When does GBP not represent Sterling?

By Gary Kennedy
November 4, 2025

TL;DR: On the London Stock Exchange GBP was, until very recently, the ticker symbol for Global Petroleum Limited. This rare overlap is confusing to humans and machines alike, and serves as a reminder that context matters.

I came across this anomaly while working on functionality to extract segment ledgers from PDFs. My word classifier was confidently tagging GBP as both a currency and a ticker symbol. Surely, I thought, that couldn’t be right — there must be a bug! Who would ever use a currency code as a stock ticker symbol? Yet someone at the LSE really did approve GBP as a ticker symbol.

Imagine reading a confirmation note that says:

“… confirms that you bought 10,000 GBP @ 0.33 GBX for 34.18 GBP.”

At first glance, it’s pure ambiguity — but our segment ledger extractor can actually read and interpret this correctly, understanding that the first GBP refers to a security and the last to a currency.

That’s the power — and the challenge — of context. This case is a nice real-world example of why contextual models outperform simple token-level tagging in financial text. Even the cleanest word-level classifiers can stumble when a label’s meaning shifts mid-sentence.

According to the official announcement (RNS Number: 8324A) on 17 March 2025, the company has since been renamed Geo Exploration Limited, with a new ticker, GEO. The SEDOL (and therefore the ISIN) remain unchanged.
Source: Research Tree – Company name change to Geo Exploration Limited

Author’s note: This observation came up during work on our PDF segment ledger extraction tool, which automatically parses, classifies, and extracts segment entries from a PDF confirmation note — and occasionally uncovers surprises like “GBP.”