This book is a user guide to financial services and understanding how the various parts need to interact in order to support a functional marketplace, and is an essential read for both seasoned professionals as well as being accessible to those new to the industry. The author presents a new and unique approach to broad industry issues, unparalleled in the area of data, standards and financial services. This book builds on the premise that the financial industry is highly complex and fragmented and the need to understand the financial industry, so vital to business, professional and individual investors, is best solved through an applied linguistics approach. That is, to break the barriers that exist between language and data with the aim to make it easier to understand how the financial industry and regulators operate for professional individual investors in order to be better served through their enhanced understanding of financial data.At first unconventional in the cross-disciplinary pairing of applied linguistics and data in financial services, it is practical and intuitive in pursuing solutions and outcomes. While focused on financial services, the approach could be leveraged for other industries that have similar challenges.