Capital markets operations run on dozens of systems that each keep their own copy of the truth. Copies drift, drift becomes breaks, and breaks become a reconciliation department. FIOS is designed the other way round: capture each business event once, validate it once, and let every process read the same record. It sits between existing systems and between firms; it replaces none of them.
An event is written once. Every view (settlement, custody, income, billing, compliance) is computed from the record in the same step. No process waits for a nightly batch, so none is ever behind another.
A department's view is a definition (columns, filters, rules), never a second copy of the data. There is nothing to reconcile between departments, because there is only one record.
When something differs, FIOS traces it to its root event and shows every process it reaches. Ten teams don't each open their own ticket for the same problem.
A correction is recorded as a new event. Every affected process clears in the same step, and the history shows exactly what was wrong, who fixed it and when.
OTC and FX trades are agreed on chat. FIOS reads the terms and compares the booking with them as soon as it is entered, before the counterparty's confirmation arrives.
Each booking is compared with its exchange fill as the fill arrives, then with the clearing report at the end of the day.
Confirmations and client allocations are matched on arrival, well ahead of settlement and of the NI 24-101 matching deadline.
Positions, cash, income, loans and fee statements are compared every day, not discovered at month-end.
Every trade carries the user ID of the trader who entered it, the desk, the workstation, and where it was allocated. Every external message carries who sent it. When something breaks, the case shows where it started (a trader's booking, a client's allocation, a counterparty's confirmation, a custodian's notice, a market move) and every process it reaches, so the right person fixes it once.
| Principle | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Between, not instead of | Existing systems keep running. FIOS connects them and the firms around them. |
| Capture once, use everywhere | Each fact enters once. Every process reads it from the same place. |
| Agreed tolerance, explicit | Rounding and price-source noise are absorbed by tolerances both sides agree on; a real difference is never hidden. |
| Nothing edited, everything traceable | Append-only record, chained fingerprints, corrections as events. |
| Standards in and out | FIX, SWIFT MT, ISO 20022, FpML, CDM, CSV: speak each system's language rather than ask it to change. |
| Read-only first | A pilot runs beside the current process on read-only data and is measured against it before anything is relied on. |
| People decide what matters | Three levels: FIOS acts on routine matches; FIOS proposes and a person approves; a person always decides on judgement calls. |
This page describes the design. The prototype on this site implements it on generated sample data; connecting it to a firm's own systems is what a pilot does. See Ecosystem to watch it run.