Open Source in Finance Forum London 2025

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.