# Should I join mutual fund data on the fund name, the ISIN, or the scheme code?

**Join on the AMFI scheme code.** The other two are worse in different ways, and one of them fails silently.

**Names are labels, not identifiers, and they move in waves.** Over one month, 1,234 schemes were renamed, 942 of them on a single day, which was the SEBI deadline for re-filing under the new categorisation. Low Duration became Ultra Short to Short Term, Savings became Money Market, Equity and Debt became Aggressive Hybrid. Any saved search or hard-coded filter on an old name comes back empty.

**Spelling drifts alongside the renames, which is worse than a rename because it is invisible.** The same feed carries five spellings of children's fund, the apostrophe in different places and one version with none at all. One large renamed hybrid fund reads AGGRESIVE with a single s, across four plans. Until the filer corrects it, a search on the correct spelling will not find it, and nothing anywhere reports an error.

**ISINs are better, and still not permanent.** In the same month 37 schemes had their ISIN swapped for a different one, and two more had an old value only eleven characters long, which were repairs.

**The case worth understanding, because it does not error:** a retired ISIN can be reassigned rather than left dead. One gold ETF now publishes a new ISIN; the code it replaced belonged to a different house, and that old code still resolves today - to that other fund, with a full price history that stops in 2023, because the fund business changed hands and the record picks up under the new house days later. **A lookup that quietly returns a plausible wrong answer is far more expensive than one that returns nothing.** If you have an identifier you cannot date, treat a successful match as a claim to check, not a result.

**The general rule beyond funds:** join on whatever the issuer treats as an identifier, never on what it treats as a description, and carry a validity date with any external code you store.

**The one caveat on scheme code:** when a fund changes manager, a NEW scheme code is issued while the ISIN stays with the instrument, so a single code can hold only one leg of the history. To stitch a full history across that boundary, search by ISIN with `active=all`, then pull each scheme code. Detail: [why some India mutual fund data looks wrong](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/why-does-india-mutual-fund-data-look-wrong). Also useful: [checking whether an ISIN is valid or simply not the one you need](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/how-do-i-check-if-an-isin-is-valid), and [what the SEBI recategorisation breaks](https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/what-changed-in-sebi-mutual-fund-categorisation-2026). Full write-up: [https://www.tigzig.com/post/amfi-name-and-isin-changes-aug2026](https://www.tigzig.com/post/amfi-name-and-isin-changes-aug2026).

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/should-i-join-fund-data-on-name-isin-or-scheme-code
Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar.
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