Short essays on bilateral matching, deterministic identity, and the operational mechanics of OTC post-trade.
A vendor saying "we use CDM" tells you nothing about whether two parties derive the same identifier. Here is a CDM swap going in and a deterministic ID coming out — the test any recon claim should pass.
The UTI is a transaction-event identifier. It was never designed to be an instrument matching key. Every recon platform that conflates the two inherits the cascade's ambiguity.
ISDA's Common Domain Model is a schema. Trade matching is an operation on data. The first does not give you the second.
Walk through what actually happens between 09:14 and 09:45 when an IRS doesn't affirm. The forensic part is finding the field that differs.
A deterministic identifier gives counterparties a shared way to know whether they are talking about the same OTC trade terms.
MarkitWire is a workflow tool, not a matching engine — and that distinction is why every break starts with thirty minutes of manual scrolling.
Most OTC breaks are not mysterious. They usually come from small differences in economic terms, dates, lifecycle fields, or conventions.
A high match rate is comforting until the remaining breaks consume the whole morning.
Instead of each side managing its own queue, the pair room creates a shared operating surface for attestations, breaks, awaiting items, and lineage.
Awaiting items look harmless until they quietly age into SLA problems.