Using the Common Domain Model (CDM)

Digital reporting requires data attributes to be represented in a way that allows programmable functional logic code to reference and generate the reporting of regulatory metrics. This is otherwise referred to as reporting being “machine readable and executable”. Project Ellipse sought to explore whether existing industry data standardisation initiatives could be re-purposed for different use cases, such as retail mortgages. Of particular interest were those initiatives that were open-sourced and geared towards being machine readable and executable.

The CDM developed by ISDA, is an open-source, standardised, machine-readable and machine-executable blueprint for how financial products are traded and managed across the transaction lifecycle. [3] The product scope of the CDM includes over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, cash securities, securities financing, and commodities. To ensure re-usability across different markets, the CDM is designed as a composable model whereby financial objects can be constructed bottom-up based on building-block components.

For these reasons, we modelled the POC mortgage attributes using the CDM. Testing the CDM’s use and extensibility for other product domains such as mortgage loans was key to the POC, as globally applicable common data models that can be used across products could minimise the number of data models in use by financial institutions and reduce mapping burden. In addition, as the CDM is open-sourced, this allows the model to be more widely accessible for testing within existing environments.