A new use for the number 59575553 (ISDA shorten's 20 character Legal Entity Identifiers to 10 character Unique Trade Identifier Prefixes)

The International Swaps and Dealers Association (ISDA) faced a minor problem recently. In shortening their 20 character Legal Entity Identifiers (LEI's) into 10 character Universal Trade Identifier (UTI) prefixes they ran into collisions.

Somewhat randomly this came across my desk. So under proposal is an improvement for hashing LEI's into UTI prefixes: the modulus operation lifted from integers to the space of case insensitive alpha-numeric strings.

You can grab the python code here. Of course it's hardly a new idea.