71 acronyms and terms used on these pages, in plain language.
| Accrual, accrued fee or interest | Fee or interest built up day by day on an open loan or bond, not yet paid. |
| ACK | Acknowledged: the alert has been seen and someone is on it. |
| ACT/360, ACT/365F | Day-count conventions: actual days divided by 360, or by a fixed 365. Two firms using different ones drift apart on accrued amounts. |
| Affirmation | Both sides confirming they agree on a trade's details before settlement. |
| Agency, principal | Agency: the dealer executes for a client and charges commission. Principal: the dealer trades for its own book. |
| Allocation | Splitting a block trade into the individual accounts it was done for. |
| API | Application programming interface: how one system talks to another. |
| Basis point (bps) | One hundredth of one percent (0.01%). Lending fees and commissions are often quoted in bps. |
| Billing statement | The fees another firm says are owed (commissions, custody, lending fees), compared against what our own records say. |
| Break | A difference between two records that should agree. |
| Case | In FIOS, one break traced to its root cause, with every process it affects and the fix that closes it. |
| Cash in lieu | Cash paid instead of a fraction of a share in a corporate action. |
| CDM | Common Domain Model: an open, standard description of trade events. |
| CDOR, CORRA, SOFR | Interest rate benchmarks: Canadian (CDOR, now retired, and its replacement CORRA) and US (SOFR). |
| CDS | CDS Clearing and Depository Services, Canada's central securities depository. |
| Clearing report | The clearing house's record of exchange trades for the day; the street side settles as cleared. |
| Client allocation | The client's instruction splitting a block trade across its accounts. It must match the dealer's allocation before settlement. |
| Collateral, coverage | Assets given to secure a loan. Coverage is collateral value divided by loan value; agreements usually require a minimum, for example 102%. |
| Corporate action | An event decided by an issuer that changes holdings: dividend, split, merger, exchange offer, rights issue. |
| Counterparty | The other firm in a trade or loan. |
| Coupon | Periodic interest paid on a bond. |
| CSV, JSON | Common export formats: spreadsheet-style, and structured text. |
| CUSIP, ISIN | Security identifiers: CUSIP (9 characters, North America) and ISIN (12 characters, international). Both end in a check digit, so most typing errors are caught. |
| Custodian | The institution that holds securities on a firm's behalf. |
| DAP/RAP | Delivery against payment / receipt against payment: institutional client trades settled against cash, the trades NI 24-101 matching applies to. |
| Dealer chat | The messaging used between traders at different firms to agree OTC and FX trades. FIOS reads the agreed terms from the conversation and compares them with the booking. |
| Default option | What a holder receives in a voluntary corporate action if no instruction reaches the agent by the deadline. |
| Digital twin | The complete, step-by-step history of one trade as FIOS recorded it. |
| Dividend | A payment by a company to its shareholders, per share. |
| DVP | Delivery versus payment: securities and cash change hands at the same time. |
| Election | A holder's choice in a voluntary corporate action (for example cash or shares), due by a deadline. Without one, the default option applies. |
| Entitlement | What a holder is owed from an income payment or corporate action, based on the position on the record date. |
| Event, golden event | One business fact (a trade, a payment, a rate change) recorded once, validated once, and used by every view. |
| Ex-date, record date, pay date | Dividend dates: buyers from the ex-date are not entitled; holders on the record date are; cash arrives on the pay date. |
| FIOS | Financial Infrastructure Operating System: the layer between systems and between firms shown here. |
| FIX | Financial Information eXchange: the messaging standard used by order systems. |
| FpML | Financial products Markup Language: a standard format for OTC derivative trades. |
| Front, middle, back office | Trading; risk and trade control; settlement and operations. |
| FX | Foreign exchange. Spot settles two business days after the trade (T+2) for most pairs, but one business day (T+1) for USDCAD; a forward settles on a later agreed date. |
| GL, suspense | General ledger: the firm's accounting books. Suspense holds amounts not yet explained; it should be empty at day end. |
| Haircut | The discount applied to collateral's value to protect the lender. |
| Hash chain | Records linked by their hashes: each one includes the previous one's, so altering any past record is detected when the chain is verified. |
| IRS, OIS | Interest rate swap; overnight index swap (an IRS whose floating leg follows an overnight rate). |
| ISO 20022 | The international standard for financial messages. It has replaced SWIFT MT for cross-border payments; securities MT messages such as MT541 and MT543 remain widely used. |
| Manufactured dividend | The payment a borrower owes the lender for a dividend paid while the shares were on loan. |
| Margin call | A demand for more collateral when coverage falls below the agreed minimum. |
| Mark, mark to market | Updating a position's value to the current market price. |
| Market claim | A claim for income paid to the wrong party, usually because a trade settled around the record date. |
| Mean lead | On average, how long before settlement an alert was raised. |
| NI 24-101 | Canadian rule on institutional trade matching and settlement. DAP/RAP trades must be matched by 3:59 a.m. on the day after the trade (T+1). |
| Nostro | An account a firm holds at another bank, usually in a foreign currency. Expected and actual cash are compared daily. |
| OMS | Order management system: where trades are entered. |
| OTC | Over the counter: traded directly between two firms rather than on an exchange. |
| Precision, recall | Precision: of the alerts raised, how many were real. Recall: of the real breaks, how many were caught. |
| Reconciliation | Comparing two sets of records and resolving the differences. |
| Reorganization (reorg) | A corporate action that changes the security itself: merger, exchange, conversion. |
| Repo | Repurchase agreement: selling a security and agreeing to buy it back later; in effect a secured loan. |
| Rerate | A change to the fee rate on an open securities loan. If one side misses it, every day after is wrong. |
| Securities lending | Lending securities to another firm for a fee, against collateral. |
| Settlement | The exchange of securities and cash that completes a trade. |
| Settlement fail | A trade or leg that does not settle on its due date. |
| SHA-256 | A cryptographic hash. FIOS hashes each record together with the previous record's hash; changing any record changes every hash after it. |
| SWIFT, MT | The interbank messaging network and its older message types (for example MT541 and MT543 for settlement instructions). |
| T+1 | Settlement one business day after the trade date. |
| Tolerance | An agreed allowance for harmless differences, such as rounding or price sources. |
| Trade error | A booking that differs from what was executed or agreed. Firms record and report these under their trade error policy. |
| Trade reference | The firm's own identifier for a trade (TRD-… on these pages), carried by every record about it. |
| Trader ID, workstation | Every booking carries who entered it and from which desk and workstation, so a break traces back to its source. |
| UTC | Coordinated Universal Time, the time standard used in the audit log. |
| UTI | Unique transaction identifier, used in derivatives and securities-financing trade reporting. |
| View | A department's or process's way of looking at the shared record. Changing a view never changes the record. |