1. Coverage

TRBC covers over 70,000 public companies from 130 countries and provides over 10 years of classification history. The classification consists of five levels of hierarchical structure. Each company is allocated an Industry, which falls under an Industry group, then Business Sector, which is then part of an overall economic sector. TRBC consists of 10 economic sectors, 28 business sectors, 54 industry groups, 136 industries and 837 Activities.^[1]

The top four levels are as follows:

2. A Market-based Classification

TRBC is a market-based classification schema, similar to the GICS and ICB systems. These classify companies on the basis of degree of impact on markets, rather than establishment-based classification systems such as the North American Industry Classification System(NAICS).

3. Use of TRBC

TRBC is used primarily in the Financial Investment and Advisory space, where investors identify and select groups of comparable companies and look at trends. More specifically, this could be Investment Managers allocating funds and benchmarking their portfolios; Investment Bankers highlighting acquisition targets and opportunities for financial restructuring, or more generally corporates performing competitive analysis of their peers in the marketplace.