Open Source in Finance Forum London 2025

The current CDM delivers meaningful workflow and cost benefits for banks. Given the material increase in existing and future exposure that banks have to physical risk events on property assets, extending the CDM will provide comprehensive foundation data fields to support end-to-end workflows for the integration of physical hazards like flood, fire and wind.

This CDM extension will enable banks to reduce the time and costs to deliver reporting, deep analytical insights for transactions and portfolios, as well as advanced risk simulation for scenario and stress testing. This will also support the transfer risk using the concept of Physical Risk Swaps for hedging and wider financial product creation to meet different risk appetites in the financial ecosystem.

To achieve this, we are extending the CDM and integrating it with the valuable components that feed solutions for existing Catastrophe Risk used widely for insurance and repurposing them with new components, including NVIDIA's AI Platforms, to create bank specific solutions.

This will be a unique Open Source solution at high speed, large scale and low cost to address current and future Physical Risks faced by banks.

The CDM enables consistent and uniform financial product and event representations and actions that are required by DLT platforms to perform atomic operations in tokenised securities. This panel discussion will bring together CDM and DLT experts to discuss how CDM functions have been or can be integrated into different token standards, protocols or smart contracts to perform lifecycle events of tokenised financial instruments, different implementation approaches and lessons learned.

Discover how the FINOS Common Domain Model (CDM) can transform your software development lifecycle (SDLC). This session demonstrates the power of object-driven development and forward engineering, going beyond surface-level integration to embrace true model-driven development. We'll unpack advanced features of CDM and Rune, highlight missed opportunities, and provide practical insights for rethinking your SDLC. Break free from black-box development and step into the future of innovation with CDM!

This session will demonstrate how users may start integrating CDM within their organisation and benefitting from some of its practical applications, such as ISDA's Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR).

One of the first questions that users ask when considering a CDM implementation is: how do I integrate it with, and map it to, my existing systems and data.

The session will expose recent developments to open-source the mapping technology in the CDM and its underlying DSL (Rune), and how users can start leveraging it for their implementation.

The session will also demonstrate some useful resources and examples that have been packaged into a freely accessible "Acme Bank" model, that illustrates an end-to-end journey to Digital Regulatory Reporting.

Note: the session could be usefully accompanied by a separate "table-top" exercise, that would guide participants through making those steps themselves.

The CDM is a foundational standard for modelling financial products, but it does not yet fully accommodate tokenised assets and blockchain-based settlements. This session will explore an initiative to extend the CDM to cover tokenised financial instruments, enabling greater integration between traditional and digital markets. I will discuss how CDM can standardise tokenisation attributes, support on-chain and hybrid settlement models, and enhance interoperability across financial infrastructures. Attendees will gain insight into how open-source collaboration can drive standardisation, reduce fragmentation, and create more transparent, efficient financial markets.

The Common Domain Model allows us to move away from maintaining the proprietary data models at the centre of our data systems.

RDF is a established and mature standard for representing datasets across web sites. In fact, an analysis from 2017 found that 44% of web domains contain some form of embedded structured data in RDF. This scale of adoption has meant that LLMs excel at synthesizing information and context when presented with RDF.

It turns out that it's straight-forward to express CDM models as RDF data, and in this talk I'll explain how, and also outline some of the many options that follow on from this:

1. Re-using existing RDF tooling to publish the CDM standard as a searchable website.

2. Integrate CDM-based financial trading information with FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology), XBRL, FRO, LSEG PermIDs and other data domains, such as those used in regulatory reporting

3. Incorporate CDM data in wider departmental Knowledge Graphs or Data Products supporting Agentic AI.

The CDM has begun carving the path of moving the structure of legal contracts into the modern field of technology. Thousands of different representations of legal contracts across hundreds of companies have been built in private repos, applications and internal workflows, and the CDM is the first real cross body attempt to represent this information in a standardized way. In this session I want to expand on why that is so important to organizations for cost saving, competition and collaboration, and also to describe the direction that I believe the CDM should take and will begin to take as we move through 2025 and 2026. Namely, to remove some of the flexibility that the CDM affords across contracts, so we can be more prescriptive in the structure and type casting of these contracts. The importance of the CDM to continue standardizing these contracts hinges more on the strong typing of each contract, over a general, one size fits all contracts approach. This is reflected in that in the past 40 years since the first ISDA master agreement, a 'one contract to fit all trades' has never been successful. The CDM should evolve to reflect this reality.