@pipeworx/fed-nic

Institution search, corporate ownership hierarchy, and merger/acquisition history for US banks and bank/financial holding companies, sourced from the Federal Reserve System's National Information Center (NIC, ffiec.gov/npw).

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1683+ live data sources.

Tools

• nic_search_institutions(query, status?, state?, limit?) — find institutions by name. Returns RSSD ID, FDIC certificate, LEI, institution type, location, active/closed status. RANKED via nic_search_ranked (migration 212): exact match, then prefix match on an active FDIC-cert institution, then any prefix match, then other active FDIC-cert institutions, then the rest — not alphabetical (see "Coverage / accuracy notes").
• nic_get_institution(rssd_id? | fdic_cert? | lei?) — full NIC record for one institution, looked up by exactly one of RSSD ID, FDIC certificate number (chains to the fdic pack), or LEI (chains to the gleif pack).
• nic_get_hierarchy(rssd_id, direction?, limit?, offset?) — direction="up" (default) walks the ownership chain to its top holder ("which holding company owns this bank?"); direction="down" lists entities owned by the given RSSD ID, paged via limit/offset, with total_subsidiary_count computed as a DISTINCT count in SQL (migration 212's nic_descendant_count) — see "Coverage / accuracy notes" for why the previous count was wrong.
• nic_get_history(rssd_id) — mergers, acquisitions, failures and transformations the institution was party to ("what predecessor institutions merged into this bank?").

Auth

Keyless — no caller-facing credential. The gateway supplies the store credential automatically.

Data sources

• https://www.ffiec.gov/npw/FinancialReport/DataDownload — NIC's public bulk CSV files: Attributes-Active, Attributes-Closed, Relationships, Transformations. US federal government data; no reuse restriction found on the download page or the NPW site (public-domain by default for federal data — see "Reuse terms" below).

Why this pack reads from a mirror, not a live proxy

www.ffiec.gov sits behind a Cloudflare Managed Challenge (cf-mitigated: challenge) that returns a 403 "CAPTCHA Error" page to every non-browser HTTP client — confirmed on both:

• the interactive NPW pages the live site itself uses per-query (Institution/Profile/{rssd_id}, POST Institution/BuildTier, POST Institution/LoadHistory), and
• the bulk CSV download endpoints (FinancialReport/Return*ZipFileCSV) themselves,

with a full Chrome header set (User-Agent, Accept, Accept-Language, sec-ch-ua*). A Cloudflare Worker's fetch() hits the identical wall — there is no header or cookie fix, it is a JS/TLS-fingerprint challenge, not a UA check — so there is no live per-query route this gateway can reach. Per Bruce's 2026-09-23 ruling ("build a copy when live doesn't serve"), this pack is instead backed by a periodically-refreshed copy of NIC's own public bulk files (migration supabase/migrations/209_fed_nic.sql), refreshed by scripts/ingest-fed-nic.mjs — see that script's header for exactly why the refresh cannot be a Worker cron and what running it manually requires. It is registered in workers/data-pipeline/src/datasets/fed-nic.ts for freshness visibility only (no scheduled run), the same pattern workers/data-pipeline/src/datasets/ffiec.ts uses for cdr.ffiec.gov.

Reuse terms

NIC's Data Download page (/npw/FinancialReport/DataDownload, "About the Files") documents the file contents and how to use them but states no copyright, license, or reuse restriction. The NIC Data Dictionary PDF (linked from that page) sits behind the same Cloudflare wall as the rest of ffiec.gov, so it could not be checked directly. This is data produced by a US federal agency (the Federal Reserve System) about a supervisory/regulatory function; US federal government works are public domain by default (17 U.S.C. § 105) absent a specific notice to the contrary, and none was found.

Coverage / accuracy notes

• Branches are not ingested. NIC's Attributes-Branches file (~174k rows, 95MB) is out of scope for the hierarchy/history use case this pack ships; the NIC UI's own "Branches" tab covers it and this could be added later.
• nic_get_hierarchy is our own computed closure, not a copy of NIC's own tiering algorithm. It recursively walks currently-active (dt_end IS NULL) edges in NIC's public Relationships file. Spot-checked live on 2026-09-23 against JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. (RSSD 852218): direction="up" matched the live UI exactly (top holder JPMorgan Chase & Co., RSSD 1039502); direction="down" from the top tier returned 877 subsidiaries by our closure versus 1,025 on the live UI. The discrepancy is not reconstructable from the public bulk file alone (the live UI's tiering algorithm likely applies rules — e.g. non-equity control bases, branch/agent relationships — that the public Relationships export does not fully carry). Treat the down-direction count as a lower bound computed from NIC's own published data, not NIC's official figure. Migration 212 fixes a separate bug in how that 877 reached the tool. The Relationships closure emits one row per ownership PATH, not one per distinct subsidiary — a subsidiary reachable through more than one parent chain appears more than once (1,672 raw rows for JPMorgan vs. 877 distinct RSSD ids). The tool originally called the raw closure RPC directly and used the returned row count as total_subsidiary_count; PostgREST caps a single RPC response at 1,000 rows, so the count silently landed on 1,000 instead of 877 whenever the raw closure exceeded that cap. nic_descendant_count (a single-row scalar, immune to the row cap) and nic_descendants_page (deduped + paged in SQL) fix this — see src/index.ts's top-of-file comment and supabase/migrations/212_fed_nic_hierarchy_and_search_fix.sql.
• nic_search_institutions ranking (migration 212, nic_search_ranked). Plain alphabetical order put same-family entities ahead of the institution most callers mean — e.g. query "Wells Fargo Bank" returned "WELLS FARGO BANK INTERNATIONAL UNLIMITED COMPANY" (an Ireland entity, no FDIC cert) ahead of "WELLS FARGO BANK, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION" (RSSD 451965) purely because ' ' sorts before ',' in ASCII. Ranking now tiers by exact match, then prefix-match-with-FDIC-cert, then any prefix match, then other cert-holding active institutions, then the rest; ties within a tier break on shortest legal_name (closest in length to the query), then trigram similarity.
• entity_type_code labels are partial. ENTITY_TYPE_LABELS in src/index.ts only carries codes verified live against the NIC UI (NAT, FHD, EDI, IBK, INB, DEO). Any other code is returned raw rather than guessed — the NIC Data Dictionary that would confirm the rest is itself behind the Cloudflare wall.
• trnsfm_cd (transformation type) is a raw NIC code, not a label, for the same reason. Code 50 is corroborated against a live example (First Republic Bank, RSSD 4114567 → JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A., RSSD 852218, 2023-05-01, "failed and ceased to exist" on the live NIC History tab).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fed-nic": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/fed-nic/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/fed-nic/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1683+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nic_search_institutions \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"query":"JPMorgan Chase Bank"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/nic_search_institutions. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Standalone (no gateway account)

This package also runs as a local stdio MCP server — no Pipeworx account, no gateway round-trip:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fed-nic": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-fed-nic"]
    }
  }
}

Or run it directly to confirm it starts:

npx -y @pipeworx/mcp-fed-nic

It speaks MCP over stdin/stdout and answers initialize/tools/list/tools/call for only this pack's tools — none of the shared meta-tools the gateway connection above adds. Same source, same tools, no ask_pipeworx routing.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Fed Nic data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT