Problem
Collateral exposure data was fragmented across external vendors and internal systems, with no unified view. Teams in risk, legal, and trading were each working from different numbers — requiring manual aggregation that was slow, error-prone, and increasingly a regulatory liability as reporting requirements tightened.
Region-specific systems had grown organically over years, each with their own vendor contracts, data schemas, and reporting cadences. There was no single owner and no canonical source of truth.
Opportunity
Create a centralized collateral exposure platform that standardizes vendor inputs, enforces a global data model, and gives risk, legal, and trading teams a single trusted source — while remaining flexible enough to handle regional compliance requirements.
Design Decisions
Centralized data model over regional schemas
The defining architectural decision: build one global data model that all vendor inputs map to, rather than letting each region maintain its own schema. This required significant upfront coordination but made downstream reporting, reconciliation, and compliance dramatically simpler.
Global interface enforced — no regional forks
Rejected the temptation to allow region-specific interface variations. Any exception to the global interface would have compounded over time into the exact fragmentation problem we were solving. Regional compliance requirements were handled through configurable rules within the global model, not separate code paths.
Configurable compliance rules layer
Designed a rules engine that let regional teams define compliance requirements without touching the core data model. This decoupled "what the data looks like" from "what rules apply to it" — a separation that proved critical when new regulations came into effect mid-rollout.
Trade-offs
What we gained
- Scalable — one model to maintain, not many
- Compliant — rules engine absorbed regulatory changes
- Standardized reporting across all regions
- Eliminated vendor-by-vendor reconciliation
What we gave up
- Slower initial adoption — global alignment is hard
- Higher upfront coordination cost across regions
- Longer design phase before any code shipped
Opportunity Cost Evaluation
Allowing regional teams to build their own solutions would have delivered results faster in the short term. But each fork would have become a maintenance liability — and as regulations changed, each region would have required separate updates. The upfront cost of global standardization was an investment in every future compliance cycle.
Regional forks → fast now, painful forever. Global interface → slow now, scalable forever. We chose the global interface, enforced it strictly, and absorbed the coordination cost early.
Success Metrics
- Eliminated ~80% of manual reporting across risk and legal teams
- Enabled tracking of $500M+ in daily collateral exposure
- Achieved global adoption across risk, legal, and trading teams
What's Next
- Add real-time exposure monitoring (currently batch)
- Introduce predictive collateral optimization
- Integrate with capital allocation systems