The Open Source in Finance Forum (OSFF) in London provided a valuable health check for industry standards, particularly the Common Domain Model (CDM).
While the underlying architecture remains robust, conversations revealed a clear shift in how contributors and member firms approach implementation. The focus is moving away from theoretical expansion toward targeted, pragmatic use cases that solve immediate business challenges.
Despite the theoretical benefits of a standardised model for financial products, widespread adoption remains a hurdle. Current estimates indicate that only around 1% of potential firms are actively implementing the framework, a metric that forces a necessary re-evaluation of how the CDM framework is managed and communicated.
Contributors at the event identified the barriers hindering broader uptake. A steep learning curve for new firms attempting to adopt the system and the technical challenge of integrating new changes for existing users, make the path to the undoubted benefits of adoption daunting for would-be adopters.
To address these barriers, the consensus among contributors suggests a change in development philosophy. There is a growing recognition that adding more to the model does not necessarily equate to a better product, and that rapid expansion introduces backward-incompatible changes between major versions, directly causing the upgrade difficulties cited by users.
The proposed solution is to deliberately slow down the pace of model expansion. Instead of expecting firms to implement the entire architecture, advocates suggest a more modular approach: with encouragement aimed at a single domain or use case initially, adopting only the specific part of the model they need before expanding later.
This shift towards focused implementation was heavily reflected in the Tokenised Assets Workshop held during the forum, where the working group explored several relevant items across asset classes. Market traction around Perpetual Swaps marks them as an interesting area for near-future development, while Intraday Repo also featured prominently in discussions; corporate actions generated some interest, though participants have not yet reached agreement on a standardised approach.
map DLT-related parties, such as wallet providers, within the model, alongside defining the end-to-end lifecycle of a tokenised asset and capturing smart contract details natively. Underpinning all of this was a core architectural question: how to best merge event workflows with product workflows to build future financial rails, and, more broadly, how to answer the exact scope of the framework, deciding what should be natively recorded versus simply identified.
A major point of discussion was the multichain problem. In a world with multiple distributed ledger technologies, participants questioned whether the model needed to represent the specificities of each chain or if that detail belonged strictly at the implementation and payment rail layer; the resulting takeaway was a strong consensus to maintain the CDM as a standard, technology-agnostic layer.
Rather than attempting to model the entirety of the digital asset landscape, the working group's main decision was to focus development on Tokenised Digital Assets for the Collateral use case. Within that scope, Tokenised Money Market Funds (MMFs) were chosen as the starting point, since the Global Digital Finance group has already published a paper on the topic that provides a strong basis to build from. The immediate plan involves reviewing that paper to establish definitions, mapping real use cases against the CDM, and integrating the results with the Digital Token Identifier (DTI) and Ledger Identifier (Ledger Id) frameworks, the DTI being explored as a multilayer representation of the same digital asset, and the Ledger Id serving as a key for tracking asset provenance across networks. Only after this initial application is complete will additional use cases be brought into scope.
Alongside the strategic pivot in use cases, the forum highlighted several technical avenues to improve the developer experience.
There is notable commercial activity occurring around the model, including implementations designed to map the Financial Information eXchange protocol to the CDM and eventually to the Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) framework, alongside commercial authoring software development kits featuring artificial intelligence suggestions.
Inspiration for future model management is being drawn from other successful open-source projects. Observers noted that the spec-driven development approach utilised by TraderX, which generates code directly from specifications and relies on statuses rather than versions to manage releases, could potentially be extrapolated to benefit the CDM; while code generation for TraderX is currently AI-assisted, it does not strictly require it.
Discussions at OSFF have identified several critical topics for future exploration. These include finding standardised ways to deal
with private extensions within the CDM framework and generating documentation directly from the codebase. There is also interest in enriching both DRR and CDM with specific identifiers like the International Securities Identification Number (ISIN), and in using DRR to effectively implement and model specific token workflows and regulatory requirements.