This video derived from a recent overview for a large bank with over $400bn in assets. Their new initiative is for Open Banking, and the meeting discussed FIBO Data Model scoping for PSD2 using the FIB-DM, Concept Maps.
You can review the PowerPoint in MS Office online and download a PDF here.
Transcript of the lecture
Hello, this is Jurgen with the FIB-DM training.
Today’s class is Semantics for Large Banks: an overview and introduction to the FIBO Data Model, and its application as an open banking accelerator. This course originally came from a presentation for a large European bank that was working on the Payment Services Directive PSD2.
Okay, here is the FIB-DM Education Track. You should have completed the first three lessons: Semantics for Managers, Project Architects, and, in particular, Semantics for Finance users, a deep dive into the FIBO/FIB-DM 15 Concepts.
We can see it kind of branching off into Semantics for Midsize, Large, and Extra Large Banks. However, the class is fully applicable to Investment Funds as well.
The example is in banking, but the rest is for all Financial Institutions.
And also, the asset size is just a rough indicator. It originally comes from the EDM Council membership tier and is also part of FIB-DM license prices. However, it doesn’t mean that if you have $200 billion in assets, you shouldn’t look at midsize banks or Excel banks. The difference is that Excel covers the Transformation Technology CODT, whereas our lesson today has an Open Banking example.
Every bank is different, and in practice, we cover all three lessons and move faster when the content repeats or isn’t critical to you.
A word about the creators of the FIBO. The EDMC and Object Management Group.
The Enterprise Data Management Council is a global association of over 200 financial institutions. They teach data management best practices and develop data standards. Probably, you have taken part in or are familiar with the Data management Capability Assessment Model. No. As a standard for Finance, the EDM Council published the Financial Industry Business Ontology.
Now, looking at the Object Management Group, also well known, with over 220 large member organizations.
They developed the UML, BPML, DDS, and SysML standards.
The latest OMG standard is the Commons Ontology Library. Commons, unlike FIBO, comments are for all industries.
Now, the two have merged. The EDMC acquired OMG effective as of October last year.
The combined association is the world’s largest nonprofit trade association and standard-setting body for data management.
The FIBO is both a business model and a schema. The EDMC calls it a “Business Conceptual Model, developed by our members to describe Financial Instruments, Business Entities, and Processes in the Financial Industry.
And this is what, in my opinion, makes FIBO so great, because its members, banks, and investment funds worked with the EDMC ontologists to define the standard.
The council specifies the model in Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Ontology Web Language. The ontology enables you to specify, for example, data values and complex constraints. That is beyond uh the Conceptual Data Model.
This makes the FIBO the authoritative model for financial industry concepts, their definitions, and relations.
EDMC members, mainly large banks and investment companies, developed the FIBO as a business conceptual model, which includes almost 2,500 classes detailing Loans, Financial Instruments, Business Entities, and Processes.
The FIBO imports OMG Commons as an upper ontology. In other words, for all classes and relations that are not specific to the financial industry.
And the Financial Industry Business Data Model has almost uh 3,200 entities and includes the complete FIBO semantics and documentation.
We created the FIB-DM using our patented Configurable Ontology to Data model Transformation (CODT). You can find the patent on Google Patents or on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website. The number is 12038939.
There’s a chasm between semantic and conventional data management.
On the left-hand side, we have the EDMC specifying the FIBO in Ontology Web Language (OWL). However, OWL needs highly specialized ontologists. FIBO is comprehensive. It has detailed coverage of Business Entities, Loans, Securities, Derivatives, and Indicators. However, many banks and investment managers don’t have the semantic expertise in-house yet. Large financial institutions started the implemention on RDF triple stores. However, IT departments must still support and design conventional databases.
And here is the bridge across that chasm. We have FIBO Knowledge Graph in ERWin, PowerDesigner, and other data modeling tools.
FIB-DM and the FIBO are the industry standard, and the Enterprise Data Management Council endorses the FIBO Data Model on its website. 3,500 users, including 162 banks, have already downloaded the open-source core version globally.
And your bank’s data architecture team has the model downloaded in PowerDesigner, maybe already migrated to ERWin.
Semantic Enterprise Information Architecture. We can look at the IT landscape by its Use, whether it’s for Business, Design, or Development.
The Type is Conceptual, Logical, Physical, and Implementation.
The level, whether it’s for Enterprise, Department, or Projects.
What you already have today is data models, an RDBMS, and XSD for messaging. You may have Process Models, and you probably have Object Models in UML.
What’s new with the FIBO is that the FIBO deploys on RDF databases.
And with FIB-DM, we have the FIBO available as a Conceptual Data Model. In the future, we can generate out of the FIBO class models and XSD.
We have the FIB-CM and the FIB Concept Maps, which are in sync and aligned with both the data model and the ontology.
The path to SEIA. This year, adopt the industry standard, the FIBO and its Data and Concept Model. Then, progress to training data architects in OWL and customizing the FIBO to become your Enterprise Ontology. With that, you’ll achieve Semantic Enterprise Information Architecture.
The benefit of this path is that we have an immediate Return on Investment by using the FIBO content and design patterns from day one, not in two years from now.
It’s easy to learn a new language like Ontology Web Language and its tooling if you already know the model’s content and design.
FIB-DM is the FIBO in PowerDesigner, ERWin, and other data modeling tools. It has um 3,173 entities, complete FIBO definitions, annotations, and axioms (the business rules).
Data architects leverage the full content of the industry standard. What we achieve with that is a common language and design patterns for semantic and relational data. The ontology, transformed into a data model, leverages relational database design.
At the top, at the apex, we have the FIBO and RDF/OWL, and the fiber, which is deployed on Triple Stores, RDF databases. RDF stores for knowledge and analytics, but it doesn’t work well for transaction processing and core banking.
So, we use the Configurable Ontology to Data model Transformation. We derive a data model from the FIBO/FIB-DM, and then we can leverage the industry standard um for our relational databases.
Atlantic CODT is the way to Semantic Enterprise Information Architecture and model-driven development. I mentioned already, this is based on the 2025/Q4 release. We have almost 3,200 entities, making FIB-DM the world’s largest data model.
The financial industry’s business can be described with 15 Fundamental Concepts.
In FIB-CM, the Concept Maps all have a name, an icon, and an abbreviation.
90% of FIB-DM entities are subtypes of Concept Entities. In the ontology, these 15 classes, most of which are defined in OMG Commons, are only subclasses of The Thing, and the other 2500 classes are subclasses of the concept class.
That’s enough to visualize design in user-friendly Concept Maps.
If you want to dive into that deeper, I recommend the class Semantics for Finance Users.
Here we have an Open Banking example, the European Union’s revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2).
That standard diagram has four actors and their interactions, their relations.
In the FIBO, these are modeled as a Role. And in FIB-DM Concept Maps, we use the mask as a symbol. We see that there is a National Competent Authority, in other words, a supervisor who certifies Third-Party Providers and enrolls the Account-Servicing Service Providers.
Now here’s a Payment Service user, who may be you as a tourist in Europe. You use a Third-Party Provider, which would be the point of sale, and that provider requests payments from the Account Services Provider, who would, in turn, validate the Service User.
And then we can expand the scope, in other words, by adding more detail to the concept maps. All roles have an identity. That’s the Agent here. In our example, the Payment Services User is a Person, and they typically have a photo ID, which is the concept of Reference that identifies them.
An agent can have many roles. It may also be a third-party provider requesting information from another bank.
The Fundamental Concepts and a standardized vocabulary establish a direct correspondence between the map and the data model.
On the left-hand side, we have another example of a Depository Institution, which is registered and incorporated as a Stock Corporation. It has a Legal Entity Identifier, Capital, and an Address.
And on the right-hand side, we see the data model that we can scope from the concept map. No. And here the circled entities, these are the elements in the concept map. We just identify these entities in the model and then establish the connections via their supertypes and associative entities.
There’s full transparency for your FIB-DM evaluation.
You can explore the open-source PowerDesigner model, FIB-DM Core. You can study the educational resources, including this lesson. You can examine the model report.
Just two more tips: Semantics for Finance Users explains the 15 Fundamental Concepts for non-technical audiences. That’s a real deep dive.
Then we have Scoping our First Data Model. That shows how to transform a concept map into PowerDesigner and how to create a project model.
For the resources, you can find the presentations in MS Office online on the FIB-DM website. The YouTube channel has this and all other videos in the course.
Well, thanks, and enjoy the ride.