What the firm does
A decomposition of the buy-side firm into 17 business domains and 171 service domains, each a discrete, non-overlapping unit of business capability. This is the part with no existing open equivalent.
Open reference model
The Open Investment Model
An open, vendor-neutral reference model of the buy-side investment firm: what an asset manager or asset owner does, and what it knows, mapped in the open.
The buy-side has never had one. Retail banking has had BIAN for years. OpenIM is the equivalent for institutional investment: a common reference, not a new standard to adopt.
17 Business Domains
171 Service Domains
86 Canonical entities
Why it exists
AI agents are becoming a real channel into the investment firm, and an agent can only operate a firm it has a model of. The architect designing one needs that model just as much.
Asset managers, sovereign funds, allocators and insurers run on proprietary vendor maps and consultancy operating-model frameworks. There is no open, maintained, vendor-neutral model of what the firm is. OpenIM fills that gap.
What a shared model makes answerable
Every manager asks these daily. Today the answers are stitched together by hand across eight to twelve systems. A shared model makes them answerable from one canonical map, with the lineage intact.
- What is this fund’s NAV per unit, and exactly what moved it since the last strike?
- What is our AUM, by strategy and by asset class?
- What is our counterparty exposure and collateral coverage on the OTC sleeve?
- Where do two systems disagree on a position or a mark, and which is right?
- Is this the same counterparty as that one, resolved to a single legal entity across every feed?
What OpenIM is
One reference model with two connected parts, open for anyone to use and build on.
What the firm knows
A canonical data model of 86 entities: a generalised core of 38, plus 5 specialisation packs for the form a holding or operation takes. Aligned to FIBO, with entity resolution as a first-class assumption.
A reference model, not a new standard
OpenIM is to the buy-side what BIAN is to retail banking. It does not replace the standards it sits among; it references them and fills the gap they leave.
- Above FIBO
- Uses FIBO for instrument and legal-entity semantics rather than redefining them.
- Alongside ISDA CDM
- Complementary. CDM models the transaction layer that sits below the firm model.
- After FINOS glue
- The maintained, vendor-neutral, agent-native successor in spirit to the archived glue project.
Get involved
OpenIM is an open commons under active development. Read it, and help shape the model the buy-side agrees on.