Consistency Checking of Financial Derivatives Transactions

Financial institutions are increasingly using XML as a de-facto standard to represent and exchange information about their products and services. Their aim is to process transactions quickly, cost-effectively, and with minimal human intervention. Due to the nature of the financial industry, inconsistencies inevitably appear throughout the lifetime of a financial transaction and their resolution introduces cost and time overheads. We give an overview of requirements for inconsistency detection in our particular domain of interest: the over-the-counter (OTC) financial derivatives sector. We propose a taxonomy for the classes of consistency constraints that occur in this domain and present how xlinkit, a generic technology for managing the consistency of distributed documents, can be used to specify consistency constraints and detect transaction inconsistencies. We present the result of an evaluation where xlinkit has been used to specify the evaluation rules for version 1.0 of the Financial Products Markup Language (FpML). The results of that evaluation were so encouraging that they have led the FpML Steering Committee to consider xlinkit as the standard for specifying validation constraints throughout.