CDM 7 is an important production release of the FINOS Common Domain Model, consolidating more than 130 individual upgrades and releases delivered over the past year of development.
The release represents a significant evolution of the model. It expands the range of financial products, agreements, lifecycle events and business processes that can be represented, while introducing major improvements to ingestion, modelling, validation, tooling, serialization and language support.
The headline CDM 7 developments include:
- completion of the transition from legacy synonym-based mappings to functional ingestion mappings, significantly improving the transparency and accessibility of FpML-to-CDM ingestion, and enabling the development ingestion functions for other data formats into the CDM
- introduction of the first major components of the Smart Contracts Framework
- expansion of the Legal Agreement model
- continued harmonisation of the Asset, Product and Observable models
- substantial enhancements to lifecycle processing, collateral, securities finance and reference data.
CDM 7 now runs on Rune DSL 10 (the open-source Domain-Specific Language underpinning the CDM), adopts a new serialization format for JSON, and supports a generated Python implementation distributed through PyPI, expanding the ways in which organisations can adopt and work with the CDM.
Together, these changes make CDM 7 one of the most significant releases in the evolution of the model. It provides a richer representation of financial contracts and business processes while making the model easier to adopt by improving ingestion, validation, extension and integration into modern technology environments.
Why is CDM 7 important?
CDM 7 is important because it advances the model in three interconnected ways:
- Increased Representation: It expands what can be represented. The model now provides richer support for legal agreements, financial products, assets, lifecycle events, collateral and securities finance.
- Improved Model Development & Maintenance: It improves how the model is developed and maintained. Functional ingestion mappings, stricter validation, Rune DSL 10 and infrastructure modernisation make the model more transparent, robust and accessible.
- Expanded Model Use: It expands how the model can be used. The new serialization format and Python implementation make it easier to integrate CDM into modern technology environments.These changes are particularly significant because they move the CDM beyond being simply a standardized data model. By providing a common representation framework, CDM 7 reduces the distance between financial contracts, source data and executable business processes.
The result is a more comprehensive, accessible and technically robust model which is better positioned to support the continued digitalisation of financial markets.
Who benefits?
The benefits of CDM 7 extend across the full lifecycle of CDM adoption:
- For developers and contributors, functional ingestion mappings and improved modelling tooling make the model easier to understand, modify and extend.
- For organisations adopting CDM, expanded product and legal agreement coverage provides a richer foundation for representing their business.
- For technology teams, the new serialization format and Python implementation make it easier to integrate CDM into existing systems and data workflows.
- For market participants, greater standardisation of lifecycle processes, legal agreements, collateral and securities finance data improves interoperability between systems.
- For future development, the Smart Contracts Framework and strengthened modelling foundations provide a platform for further automation of contractual and lifecycle processes.
What's new in CDM 7?
This release delivers enhancements in twelve key areas:
A major focus of CDM 7 has been the continued development of the FpML Confirmation Ingestion Framework.
The release significantly expands the ability to transform FpML confirmations into native CDM representations across Rates, Foreign Exchange, Credit, Equity and Commodity products. It also adds support for additional transaction supplements and lifecycle events, while adopting a flattened FpML model that aligns the generated model structure more closely with source FpML documents.
Most importantly, CDM 7 completes the transition away from legacy synonym-based ingestion approaches to functional ingestion mappings.
This represents a fundamental change in how ingestion logic is developed and maintained. Rather than relying on mappings hidden within Java implementations and requiring specialist technical knowledge, ingestion logic is expressed through Rune functional mappings that can be reviewed, understood and modified by anyone with knowledge of the CDM.
This makes ingestion logic more transparent, improves maintainability, and significantly lowers the barrier to contributing to the model.
The result is a more accessible path from source data into the CDM, supporting the broader industry objective of enabling a consistent workflow from FpML → CDM → downstream processing and reporting.
CDM 7 substantially expands the model's ability to represent legal agreements and contractual documentation.
The release incorporates content migrated from ISDA Foundations and provides richer support for Credit Support Annexes (CSA), Credit Terms Annexes (CTA), GMSLA agreements, umbrella agreements and associated elections.
Additional enhancements improve the representation of agreement metadata, valuation responsibilities, calculation agent provisions and legal agreement contact information.
These changes are important because financial transactions cannot be fully understood through trade data alone. Their economic and operational meaning is also determined by the legal agreements, elections and contractual provisions that govern them.
By bringing more of this information into the CDM, the model can provide a more complete and interoperable representation of the relationship between legal documentation, transactions and lifecycle events.
This provides a stronger foundation for digital processing of contractual terms and reduces the separation between legal agreements and the transactions they govern.
CDM 7 introduces the first major components of the Smart Contracts Framework through the development of the Instruction Composition Framework and associated lifecycle execution enhancements.
Historically, the CDM has provided a declarative representation of contractual terms, events and state transitions. The Smart Contracts Framework begins to extend this capability by providing a standardized approach to representing how contractual processes are operationally executed.
The initial implementation focuses on interest rate reset processing. It introduces a state-machine-based execution framework capable of tracking workflow progress, accumulating intermediate state and determining the next operational step in a lifecycle process.
Supporting Event Model enhancements move reset calculations, observations, rate determinations and audit information upstream into lifecycle instructions before execution occurs.
This creates the foundation for more deterministic, auditable and reusable lifecycle workflows.
Over time, this approach can reduce reliance on proprietary procedural implementations and create a more consistent way for market participants to represent and execute multi-step contractual processes.
CDM 7 continues the evolution of the product model introduced in CDM 6 through further harmonisation of the Asset, Product and Observable models.
The release improves asset classification, observable modelling, scheduled and contingent transfers, product qualification logic and commodity and equity taxonomy support. It also introduces additional temporal concepts for products and event instructions.
At the same time, a number of legacy structures and deprecated modelling patterns have been removed, beneficial as it reduces redundant data in the code base, making it cleaner and more concise.
These changes address longstanding modelling complexity and improve consistency across asset classes. They make it easier to represent a wider range of business use cases using a more coherent set of model structures.
The result is a model that is simpler to evolve while providing greater flexibility for representing financial products, assets, prices, quantities and lifecycle events.
A significant portion of CDM 7 is focused on improving lifecycle event processing and workflow consistency.
The release includes improvements to transfer processing, reset calculation workflows, quantity changes, qualification functions, schedule termination processing and securities finance lifecycle events.
Several event functions have been refactored to move calculations closer to instruction generation. This reduces downstream complexity and makes the logic behind lifecycle processing decisions more explicit.
The changes improve the ability of the model to represent not only the contractual state of a transaction, but also the processes that transform that state over time.
This provides a stronger foundation for deterministic event generation, auditability and workflow automation.
CDM 7 further strengthens support for collateral management, securities finance and margin-related use cases.
Enhancements include improved collateral eligibility criteria, debt and equity collateral classifications, inventory management, locate workflows, securities lending lifecycle processing, collateral guarantor support and standardised initial margin calculations.
These capabilities improve the representation of collateral and securities finance workflows across both pre-trade and post-trade processes.
The expanded model provides a more consistent way to represent the relationships between collateral, inventory, securities lending activity and margin calculations.
This supports greater interoperability across systems and creates a stronger foundation for automation in collateral and securities finance processes.
CDM 7 includes enhancements to reference data and taxonomy support, improving alignment with external industry standards and regulatory reference data sources.
The release includes updates to FpML coding schemes, ISO currency reference data, Legal Entity Identifier support and taxonomy classifications.
Additional validation capabilities improve consistency between CDM enumerations and the external standards to which they correspond.
This is important because interoperability depends not only on the structure of the data model, but also on the consistency of the reference data and coding schemes used within it.
CDM 7 introduces support for Rune DSL 10, representing a significant modernisation of the language and toolchain used to develop and maintain the Common Domain Model.
The upgrade introduces stricter validation rules and modelling conventions, strengthening type safety and removing a number of legacy modelling patterns that had previously been retained for backward compatibility.
The release resolves a range of legacy syntax issues, including cardinality mismatches, attribute overrides, metadata annotations and duplicate type definitions.
It also removes the ability to extend choice types and introduces stronger validation around choice-type navigation and path expressions.
These changes improve the robustness and clarity of the model and establish a more future-proof foundation for continued CDM development.
CDM 7 includes one of the most significant infrastructure modernisation efforts undertaken within the project.
The release includes validation hardening, dependency modernisation, Java namespace rationalisation, build performance improvements, schema publication support and the removal of legacy modelling constructs.
It also removes unsupported code generators and introduces improvements to Python build and deployment processes.
Together, these changes reduce technical debt and improve the maintainability, performance and long-term sustainability of both the model and its supporting toolchain.
CDM 7 expands the supporting ecosystem around the model through additional sample data, testing artefacts and implementation examples.
The release includes:
- Additional ingestion test coverage
- Expanded legal agreement sample data
- Securities lending visualisations
- Improved validation logging
- Regression expectation maintenance tooling
These resources make it easier for users to understand new functionality, test implementations and validate changes across different deployment environments.
By improving the practical resources surrounding the model, CDM 7 reduces the effort required to evaluate and adopt new capabilities.
CDM 7 introduces the newest version of the CDM serialization format.
Users can now serialize and deserialize the new JSON format into CDM objects.
This provides a consistent and modern mechanism for exchanging CDM data and supports the broader evolution of the model's integration capabilities.
However, adopters upgrading from CDM 6 should be aware that any existing data will need to be converted to the new JSON serialisation standard before it can be used with CDM 7.
CDM 7 introduces a generated Python implementation of the CDM, distributed through PyPI, the standard package repository for the Python ecosystem.
The Python implementation provides more complete support for CDM modelling, including Python generation from Rune-defined functions and full support for the new serialization format.
Making the generated implementation available through PyPI significantly expands the potential audience for the CDM.
Python is widely used across data engineering, analytics, quantitative finance, automation and machine learning. Providing the CDM through the Python ecosystem makes it easier for organisations and developers in these communities to integrate CDM into existing workflows.
This also supports a broader adoption model in which the CDM can be used directly within familiar development environments, without requiring users to build and maintain their own language-specific implementations.
Migration considerations
CDM 7 includes several backward-incompatible and migration-impacting changes.
Organisations upgrading from CDM 6.x should review changes to:
- The Product, Asset and Transfer models
- Asset and AssetType harmonisation
- Qualification function locations and behaviours
- The migration from legacy synonym mappings to functional ingestion mappings
- Legal Agreement model namespaces and structures
- Removed deprecated types, enums and namespaces
- Generated code packages and dependency versions
- The new serialization format
These changes should be assessed as part of any CDM 7 migration to identify impacts on existing integrations, generated code, data models and implementation workflows.
CDM 7 is therefore both a significant capability release and an important architectural milestone. By combining a broader model with more accessible ingestion, stronger validation, improved tooling and expanded language support, it provides a stronger foundation for the next stage of CDM adoption.
Get Involved
Attend a Working Group Meeting
Interact with the CDM Community
References
- CDM code base in the FINOS GitHub repository: https://github.com/finos/common-domain-model
- CDM Documentation : https://cdm.finos.org/docs/home
- CDM 7 navigation and visualisation in Rosetta: https://ui.rosetta-technology.io/
- CDM 7 release note: https://github.com/finos/common-domain-model/releases/tag/7.0.0
- CDM release schedule: https://github.com/finos/common-domain-model/blob/master/SCHEDULE26.md
- Need help? Visit: https://cdm.finos.org/docs/get-involved
Authors: Lionel Smith-Gordon, Head of Client Services, and Ben Page, CDM Release Manager, REGnosys
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