The Stuff of Legend is open-sourced
In late 2019, Goldman Sachs contributed PURE, its logical modelling language, as well as Alloy, a platform and visual modelling tool that generates PURE-based models, to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS). These have since been combined and open-sourced as “Legend” under the Apache 2.0 license. Available for almost a year, the platform has gained good traction in the industry.
Legend aims to provide a holistic solution that addresses all data challenges financial institutions face by providing accurate, timely, and safe access to data. The user experience is designed to allow anyone in the organization and across organizations to gain a better understanding of data, rather than limiting those discussions to a few experts in specific silos. It also bridges the gap between the business and engineering worlds.
Legend consists of four front-end, and two back-end components: Legend Cube, Legend Studio, Legend Query, as well as Legend Services for the former, and Legend Execution & Legend SDLC for the latter.
With Legend Cube, end users can connect to the various different data sources in the enterprises (if appropriately permissioned), explore the raw data through drag & drop queries, and establish an understanding of the domain, putting sometimes fairly cryptic data attributes into business context.
Once that understanding has been developed, users can migrate to Legend Studio to describe the data in business friendly terms and define data relationships, which are then used by Legend Query (again, instead of the technical terms). If those queries based on the model data are to be shared more broadly, Legend Services provides an easy, self-service approach to creating data services as APIs that can feed those model data into internal business intelligence dashboards or other tools.
All this is supported by the execution engine which powers the queries that users run using Legend, and also a software development lifecycle (SDLC) that allows users to efficiently and safely create data models.
Within the industry, Legend has been deployed to work with the International Swaps Dealer Association’s (ISDA) Common Domain Model (CDM). While ISDA has for a long time been a supporter of the Financial Products Markup Language (FpML), CDM has been developed by REGnosys as a next-generation industry standard for the representation of OTC derivative products and trade lifecycle events. It is a common language that all market participants can use to store, manage and process derivative products efficiently.
For FX Options, the work with Legend across the industry has delivered one code change to the industry standard, identified a new event type required, and also led to a new industry working group on Currency Reference Data. Within Commodities, it enabled the working group to significantly shorten the time to develop the first draft of a Commodities Reference Data model. Explorations within the ESG space so far have seemed too early, but given the focus on this sector, it will almost certainly turn into a focus area in the future.
Participants across the industry have initially included Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and RBC Capital Markets, with new names being added constantly. If you would like to know more, please check out the website or github repository, and check out Pierre de Belen’s succinct presentation from the end of last year.
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