The International Capital Market Association (ICMA), International Securities Lending Association (ISLA), and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) has appointed FINOS to run a repository for the Common Domain Model (CDM).
The Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) will provide a repository to foster the growth of an open-source community for the CDM.
The appointment of FINOS will advance the development and increase the speed of adoption and distribution of the CDM, with a view to migrate to FINOS by the start of 2023. The model will then be distributed on an Apache licence-standard for open-source software.
In May 2022, the associations held a service proposal to meet the requirements of providing a repository for the open-source CDM, which establishes a single, common digital representation of trade events and actions across the lifecycle of financial products.
The requirements included maintenance of the CDM code, facilitating the growth of a community to contribute to the development of the CDM, and allowing for governance of the contributions to be overseen by the associations.
Commenting on the news, Andrew Dyson, CEO at ISLA, says: “Fostering an open-source community through FINOS’s global reach and resourcing will ensure faster development and convergence on standards.
“Appointing FINOS moves forward the long-term strategy agreed on by the associations in our Memorandum of Understanding and importantly should ensure acceleration of adoption.”
Bryan Pascoe, ICMA CEO, adds: “The collaboration with FINOS marks a milestone in promoting open and common standards across financial markets. The CDM, as a cross-industry initiative, plays a key role in supporting the digital transformation of capital markets, fostering interoperability and cohesiveness through FINOS’ open-source framework.”
According to ISDA CEO Scott O’Malia, having a completely transparent, open-source CDM maintained by FINOS and supported by three trade associations will help accelerate adoption, bringing greater consistency across derivatives, repo and securities lending.
O’Malia concludes that the move will avoid fragmentation of standards and duplication of effort across the industry.
