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Community Blog

Project Updates: Financial Objects: Product Control Common Template

November 17, 2022

There is a lot happening within our SIGs and Projects, and we want to highlight some, including Financial Objects.

The FINOS Financial Objects SIG (Special Interest Group) is a community-led forum to discuss and identify the need for new, open financial object standards as well as modifications to existing standards, and The goal of the Financial Objects SIG is to provide a neutral forum for individuals across the financial services industry to collectively identify the need for new, open, financial objects standards as well as modifications to existing ones. The Financial Objects SIG also aims to promote the adoption of financial object definitions and models that support common industry workflows and use cases.

In January 2021, The FO SIG proposed and launched two projects: the Commodities Payout and the Product Control Common Template. It became evident that after the launch of the two working streams, there were overarching, common elements to these work streams (modeling financial objects, using Legend & the FINOS hosted Legend Studio instance, and leveraging the ISDA CDM); every workstream has specific requirements that warrant separate governance structures.

For the Product Control Common Template, the project maintainers define the project in three steps: 

  1. To construct a common template data model using Legend Studio (an approved open-sourced data modeling tool that allows users to create a data model in a graphical user interface).
  2. This common template data model will include all the attributes required by each vendor to run their valuation process and return the consensus data to the banks.
  3. Banks can connect their daily pricing data to the industry-approved model for submission, and the vendor can leverage the same model to provide the consensus data. Thereby, both the banks and vendors will communicate in the same common model language.

The vision for the Product Control Common Template project is to standardize the data exchange process between banks and vendors by setting up an industry-approved common template and linking them via Model to Model mapping in the Legend instance. This will reduce friction, promote data standardization, and reduce bank onboarding costs in the consensus pricing industry.

To help the Product Control Common Template move into its next round of development, we are looking for more participants to test sample data using the linked guidelines and sample template from Legend. The open source data model and template standardize how consensus-based pricing information is shared across the industry and is ready to be tested. 

This modeling initiative goal will help address regulators' concerns about dependency on a single service provider providing a resolution to disruption risk.

To help us validate the results, the tester will need a Gitlab account, a local developer drive activated (e.g., H:\ drive), and Java/Maven installed in your local drive to start testing. All other steps are detailed in the linked guide above. 

As a token of appreciation for helping us validate the results, FINOS will be awarding the first three submissions with complimentary registration to attend the FINOS Open Source in Finance Forum New York on December 8th. 

Get involved with Legend and the Product Control Common Template:

If you're interested in contributing to Financial Objects data models on the FINOS hosted instance of Legend Studio, please submit your interest at finos.org/legend and you will be granted "read-only" access to view models.

Editing and creating models in Legend Studio is enabled once a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is signed by your organization. Please see the Contribution Compliance Requirements and email help@finos.org with questions.

For more info, checkout the project README.


Other projects to get involved with: 

Interested in FINOS open source projects? Click the link below to see how to get involved in the FINOS Community.

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