At the end of May, I wrote a derivatiViews post laying out ISDA’s ambitious vision for the future of derivatives market infrastructure. The system as it stands is creaky, over-complicated and outdated, increasing cost and compliance burdens for all market participants. New technologies can alleviate many of these problems, but first we need a reform of current standards and practices.

I am happy to report that, in the short time since that blog was published, progress toward this goal has started to pick up speed. ISDA is working with the wider industry to solve one of the major infrastructure problems – the lack of commonality in market processes and events. There is no concrete, shared description of even the most basic market activities that we all take for granted, like posting margin or novating a trade. That means each firm has tended to develop its own policies and procedures for each event, and has represented them differently in internal systems.

When regulators introduce new rules, each institution goes away and implements the text by mapping it to its own internal systems, meaning each firm could view the same requirements through a slightly different lens, creating inconsistencies in how data is represented and what is reported.

ISDA has begun categorizing these core events and actions in the trade lifecycle into a common terminology that can be translated into standardized, machine-readable code. From here, they can be collected into a common domain model (ISDA CDM). This will offer market participants a common representation of fundamental industry processes and concepts – breaking down each event into a ‘before’ and ‘after’ state, and precisely defining the change that occurs between the two. Individual firms won’t need to spend time and effort on developing their own definitions of basic tasks – they can all simply pluck the same definition from the ISDA CDM. That will free up resources for activities that deliver added value to their clients.

It sounds simple, but it’s a huge task. Getting everyone to agree on a set of definitions, and encouraging widespread adoption, will be challenging. That’s why ISDA, with its reach across the market and history of introducing common standards, is the perfect organization to push this work forward.

In September, ISDA should have developed an initial CDM design, and will then decide the format and mechanism for its wider publication. Within the same time frame, we also expect to have expanded the supporting business case for adoption of the ISDA CDM.

The short-term benefits of such a CDM are numerous. When new regulations are introduced, supervisors can communicate their requirements by reference to the CDM and remove much of the current pain around interpretation. If the CDM needs updating, then this could be arranged through discussion with the market to ensure the model remains reflective of industry practice. This would improve consistency of implementation, and transparency.

In the longer term, the establishment of common definitions for key lifecycle events should help facilitate the implementation of shared data storage facilities, distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts. This will enable a single, central, secure representation of each trade, through which trade events can be automated via the standard processes contained in the CDM. This will eliminate the need for constant reconciliation between counterparties, which does so much to gum up current infrastructures.

We will shortly be releasing a whitepaper that will look at the use of distributed ledger and smart contracts from a legal perspective – this will set out the different smart concepts in play, and describe some of the legal and operational challenges involved in bringing them into use.

All of this will be done with a careful eye on compliance, and on optimizing new regulatory obligations. We will also keep the global regulatory community updated on our progress, and we hope to bring in their expertise to help overcome some of the possible hurdles in the road ahead.

As I mentioned in May, this is a bold vision, and will require plenty of tough decisions to be made by the industry. There are a host of operational and legal issues to overcome. But we can’t stay still and accept things the way we are now. We need to push forward and help design a derivatives market that is fit for the demands of the 21^st century.