KENNETT SQUARE, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chatham Financial, an independent financial risk management firm, today announced that its technology team earned the Best Solution Architecture Award at Barclay’s DerivHack 2018 in New York.
The Hackathon, which took place simultaneously in New York and London on September 20 and 21, enabled market participants across the industry to focus on the practical implementation of International Swaps and Derivatives Association’s (ISDA) Common Domain Model (CDM) using emerging technology enablers. CDM is being developed to serve as a standard, digital blueprint for how derivatives are traded and managed across their lifecycle. The teams were asked to code and showcase solutions that will increase the efficiency of derivatives processing, specifically post-trade operations.
The Chatham Financial team included Eli Faulkner, Ethan Giordano, John Bagatta, Jaroslaw Stachowiak and Elizabeth Thorwart.
“We are interested and invested in helping inform the evolution to a less fragmented, more efficient market infrastructure for derivatives contracts processing,” said Pooja Hegde, chief technology officer at Chatham Financial. “It’s very exciting to showcase our team’s talent through events like this and the win is especially gratifying given the number of teams and companies competing.”
Barclays hosted DerivHack 2018 in partnership with ISDA and REGnosys to challenge participants to deploy the ISDA CDM digital model on their choice of distributed ledger technology (DLT). Participants were provided several use cases (set-up counterparty data, new trade event, trade events, lifecycle events, settlement and reporting). The feedback from the hackathon will be used to determine which DLT is the best choice for the implementation of the ISDA CDM in the market.
The Chatham team elected to use Ethereum and deploy the ISDA CDM on blockchain. They chose this approach because Ethereum is a public platform, while other DLT solutions used by hackathon participants are proprietary. Since Chatham represents end-users with various degrees of technological expertise, the team felt a public platform promoted equal access to the model and its benefits.
“We are proud to be on the cutting edge of this technology and to represent the needs of end users,” said Eli Faulkner, director of models development at Chatham Financial. “We hope to use our influence to ensure that the technology that gets adopted by the market works to streamline the workflows and needs of end users to make hedging programs easier to implement.”
ISDA introduced its CDM in October 2017 to create a model for the post-execution lifecycle that can be leveraged with emerging technologies like smart contracts and DLTs. In February 2018, ISDA contracted REGnosys to build the digital CDM. REGnosys continues to work on improving these models based on market feedback collected from ISDA Working Groups.
ISDA's Market Infrastructure and Technology Oversight Committee (MITOC) and CDM Design Working Group along with REGnosys will use the case study results and feedback from participants to further iterate on the digital version of the CDM.
Chatham will continue participation in ISDA CDM Working Groups, which will allow Chatham to share its technical expertise and provide feedback on the model and its implementation.
Chatham’s technology team develops and maintains the ChathamDirect platform, technology models, and quantitative analytics in the areas of financial risk management, hedge accounting, derivative and debt valuations, debt management and defeasance.
About Chatham
Chatham Financial is an independent financial risk management firm helping clients overcome common yet complex capital markets challenges. Chatham works with over 2,000 clients globally, providing advisory and technology solutions to corporations, financial institutions, private equity and real estate companies. Since its founding in 1991, Chatham has hedged over $5 trillion notional, helping clients understand and use debt and derivatives as a critical piece of their financial strategy. Chatham is a multiple bottom line firm committed to delivering trust and transparency in the capital markets.
