LONDON – December 4, 2023 - FINOS, the Fintech Open Source Foundation announces in partnership with The International Securities Lending Association (ISLA), International Capital Market Association (ICMA), and International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), the launch of version 5.0 of the Common Domain Model (CDM), released in November. This major release, hosted on FINOS, features a multitude of technical, product, and event improvements.

The CDM aims to unify a series of actions, life cycle events, and product definitions through the development of a single language or code. CDM 5.0, a production release, is the culmination of development releases from the second and third quarters of 2023 since the CDM was made an open-source project at FINOS in February of this year. The open project hosted at FINOS offers a unique opportunity for members from ISLA, ICMA, ISDA, and the broader financial services community to collaborate and drive industry standards forward in a transparent and inclusive manner. 

"The ongoing consistency in releases provides compelling evidence of the CDM's progress and its establishment of a steady cadence as an Open Standard project within FINOS. We are excited and proud to guide the seamless integration of the CDM community of contributors into the larger open source FINOS community." Jane Gavronsky, Chief Operating Officer at FINOS.

“With this release, all the work undertaken in 2023 by the ISLA CDM, CDM Trading and CDM Legal Working Groups has been put into production,” says Chris Rayner, Senior Associate – Market Infrastructure & Technology at ISLA. 

“Repo market participants can now use the production version of the CDM to help automate a broad range of repo trading and post-trade processes, reducing the operational burden and freeing up resources to automate manual tasks and prepare for potential industry innovations such as the shortening of the settlement cycles and the emergence of digital bonds” says Gabriel Callsen, Director, FinTech and Digitalisation, at ICMA. 

“We’re delighted that version 5.0 of the CDM is now available, which extends coverage of the model in some key areas. We look forward to working with FINOS, ICMA, ISLA and the broader financial community to further develop the CDM,” says David Shone, Director of Product - Data and Digital, at ISDA.

There are also several technical changes since version 4.0, which was released in the third quarter of 2023, related to bug fixes, dependencies, and synonym mappings. 

Key Contributions for ISLA:

• Master agreements can now be modelled using a generic structure, allowing clauses, variants, and additional criteria to be represented in a CDM object. 
• Lenders can distribute lists of their available securities in a standardised format, supporting a general broadcast of their availability to the market or specific quantities targeted at individual counterparties or agents. 
• Borrowers can use the new Borrower Locate structure to request securities from lenders.

Key Contributions for ICMA:

• Addition of lifecycle events for partial delivery, repricing, adjustment and substitution. Repo rolls, re-rate, interest payment, pair-off and shaping were released previously.
• Additional functions to simplify access to repo data elements for collateral price, collateral quantity and purchase price.
• Ability to define GC baskets with collateral eligibility criteria.

Key Contributions for ISDA:

• The CDM has been extended to cover exchange-traded derivatives and commodity derivatives.
• Coverage of collateral management has been enhanced with the addition of a functional model for assessing collateral eligibility. The model also now allows users to select from a group of triparty agents used to manage collateral on a trade.
• Multiple enhancements have been made to support ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting initiative, including amendments to trade date and time and trade valuations.
• The CDM is now available via Excel code generation.

Further details about the content of the CDM 5.0 and contribution release notes can be found here.

To learn more about the continued progress around this initiative, FINOS, ISLA, ICMA and ISDA are set to return to London on 28 February 2024, for the CDM Showcase. This one-day conference invites delegates to witness first-hand the breadth and scope of the advances in the model, and its underlying technology, and be the first to hear about some of the exciting future plans of the CDM community. Full event details including sponsorship packages are available here.

To get involved with the CDM project, please contact us or join any of the upcoming FINOS working groups.

About FINOS

FINOS (The Fintech Open Source Foundation) is a nonprofit whose mission is to foster adoption of open source, open standards and collaborative software development practices in financial services. It is the center for open source developers and the financial services industry to build new technology projects that have a lasting impact on business operations. As a regulatory compliant platform, the foundation enables developers from these competing organizations to collaborate on projects with a strong propensity for mutualization. It has enabled codebase contributions from both the buy- and sell-side firms and counts over 75 major financial institutions, fintechs and technology consultancies as part of its membership. FINOS is also part of the Linux Foundation, the largest shared technology organization in the world. Get involved and join FINOS as a Member. To stay up to date on FINOS news, events, podcasts, blogs, and more, sign up here.

About ISLA 

The International Securities Lending Association (ISLA) is a leading industry association, representing the common interests of securities lending and financing market participants globally. Its diverse membership of over 190 members includes institutional investors, asset managers, custodial banks, prime brokers, and service providers. Follow us on socials: LinkedIn | X. 

Contacts
For General ISLA enquiries, contact: regtech@islaemea.org
For ISLA Press enquiries, contact: press@islaemea.org
For FINOS enquiries, contact: aaron.griswold@finos.org