The financial services industry is full of duplicated and repetitive tasks performed within each of the financial firms with little or no standardization. One of the most affected functions is data management with the lack of standard data to describe different data domains and types. Entity data, instrument data, corporate actions and events data, pricing and evaluation data and position and transaction data is required to generate trading signals, calculate risk, execute trades, track investment performance, complete clearance and settlement, and perform asset servicing in the normal course of business. Many of the business problems occur because there is no standard list of terms and definitions to describe the required information as well as relationships between these terms. Additionally, there is no standard scheme that acceptably categorizes the various asset classes in which businesses are transacted and classify entities in different business segments.

To accelerate the development of φmod, element22 has contributed a conceptual model for legal entity data to help firms and individuals in financial services industry that are embarking on implementation of Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) requirements and to consolidate their existing legal entity data. The φmod model was reviewed by a number of industry experts who suggested additions and changes to the model so that it addresses problems that they are facing. In addition Dataset IO team helped with their expertise and tools to review, document and present φmod.

"There are many data models present within each of the financial services firms, data vendors, software vendors, exchanges, clearing houses, settlement banks, depositories and regulatory agencies." - said Predrag Dizdarevic, Managing Partner of element22."Every new project starts modeling data almost from scratch, assuming nothing within the firm or in industry has been previously done. φmod is an attempempt to both stand966;mod is an attempempt to both standardize data models in the financial services industry as well as to provide instantly usable data model in the form of messaging or data base schemas. Contributions to and usage of φmod are crucial for continual improvement, evolution and expansion from the initial release and we are welcoming everyone to join open source project."
Core development team that worked on first release of φmod consisted of industry veterans that included John Carroll from element22, Tom Charlton from element22, Predrag Dizdarevic from element22, Philip Dodds from Dataset IO, Roger Newman from element22, Ken Price previously from Avox, Niel Siekerka from element22, Garry Wright from Dataset IO, and many others who asked not to be named due to their company policies.