Over the counter (OTC) derivatives remain one of the world’s largest financial markets. Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data puts notional outstanding at roughly US $700 trillion at mid 2024. Yet pockets of manual effort still reside in day today processing with industry estimates suggesting 20% of OTC trades are confirmed and settled by email or spreadsheet. The combination of huge volumes and human touchpoints leaves firms exposed to failed trades, capital drag and regulatory penalties.
Earlier this month, Delta Capita unveiled Elaris OTC, a cloud native OTC derivatives confirmation and lifecycle platform that sits on Fragmos Chain’s distributed ledger technology (DLT). The service promises real time matching of any OTC product while translating all messages into the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) Common Domain Model (CDM). For a market still juggling multiple file formats and bilateral workarounds, the promise is straightforward: fewer breaks, faster funding release and a common data standard.
A landscape still bound by legacy pipes
A decade of regulatory reform pushed much of the industry onto electronic utilities, yet large dealers say bespoke structures, exotic asset classes and late life events still force them outside those hubs. The residual manual load shows up in operational risk capital and, increasingly, in cash penalty regimes under Europe’s Central Securities Depository Regulation (CSDR).Parallel rule rewrites are forcing richer, more standardised data. The 2024 European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) Refit expanded reporting fields from 129 to 203 and moved the industry to ISO 20022 messaging.
ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) codebase, which now spans seven jurisdictions including Canada’s July 2025 rewrite, is built on CDM to avoid divergent interpretations. Any post trade tool that ignores the new schema risks duplicating work or, worse, misreporting.
Delta Capita is no newcomer to capital markets plumbing. The London headquartered firm employs about 1,500 staff across Europe, Asia and the Americas. In January 2025 HSBC signed a multiyear contract handing global OTC confirmation and settlement work to Delta Capita. The company has also acquired key pieces of technology: London Stock Exchange Group’s client onboarding platform in April 2024 and client lifecycle specialist Aurora in November 2024. In April 2025 it sold a Dutch compliance subsidiary to Capgemini, sharpening its focus on scalable utilities.
Paris based Fragmos Chain began life in 2019 with the goal of making CDM the native data model for derivatives post trade. Its platform runs on R3’s Corda DLT and has been battletested: a February–March 2024 consortium of six global banks cut average confirmation times for complex swaps to six minutes. Earlier, a 2022 partnership with Finastra gave the start up an onramp to the vendor’s Summit trading system.
What sits under the hood of Elaris OTC
Fragmos Chain supplies the synchronised ledger; Delta Capita wraps that core with connectivity and people. Incoming messages – whether FIX, FpML, SWIFT or plain CSV – are auto translated into CDM objects, creating a single “golden” event record. Lifecycle events (rate resets, fees, compressions, novations) update the shared ledger in real time and cascade to both parties’ books. Crucially, clients that are not on the platform can still exchange emails or SWIFT messages with Delta Capita’s operations team.
Most existing utilities cover only slices of the workflow – Trade date confirmation, valuation breaks, collateral management etc. Each step demands costly mapping and reconciliation. Elaris OTC aims to eliminate the friction by making CDM the first representation of the trade rather than the last, and by outsourcing the final mile of off platform outreach to a managed service desk.Adoption path and open questions
Delta Capita starts with built in volume from its HSBC mandate and six banks already comfortable using Fragmos Chain’s ledger. Whether that is enough critical mass to lure the buyside remains to be seen; asset managers have historically balanced automation gains against concerns over data sharing and vendor lock in.
Three areas worth watching over the next 18 months:
- Compression and clearing links – CDM could make portfolio level tear ups or CCP flows plug and play.
- Intraday collateral optimisation – real time lifecycle data unlocks same day variation calls, a hot topic under the Uncleared Margin Rules.
- RegTech convergence – if Elaris can generate DRR ready output, firms may avoid yet another translation layer when Canada, Hong Kong and the EU roll out fresh reporting templates.
A measured step, not a silver bullet
Elaris OTC won’t eliminate spreadsheets from derivatives back offices overnight. But by combining a CDM native ledger with the often overlooked labour of chasing stragglers, the service illustrates how utility operations and modern data standards can reinforce each other. For chief operating officers weighing their next technology refresh, the experiment is worth tracking. Manual effort may account for only one trade in five, but at a US $700 trillion scale, small percentages matter.
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