1. User Guide
  2. Other OFSDF Result Tables
  3. Staging Data Model
  4. Details of the Staging Data Model

3.4.2 Details of the Staging Data Model

The CSA model consists of over 900 tables and nearly 9000 attributes. These tables are organized into multiple 'subjects', currently by analytical use case/solution need.

However, it makes sense to first understand the staging area tables in terms of content before understanding how they map to analytical use cases.

There are two broad categories of staging data, regardless of the use case or analytical application that requires it:

  • Business Data: This set of tables captures the actual business events and the resulting state of a bank from those business events. The OLTP systems (or Transactional Systems) capture this information resulting from the execution of the bank's different business processes. Broadly, this information can be categorized as:
    • Events: Business transactions, whether financial or non-financial, represent business happenings (events) that are relevant for analytical purposes. For example – a financial transaction by a customer on a current account is a specific event. Events happen at a specific point in time, and are recorded by OLTP systems. In the staging area model, there are several transaction tables that capture this detail – for both financial and non-financial transactions.
    • State: The net effect of business transactions is to change the bank's overall financial/non- financial state. An example of this – when a customer opens a checking/current account and deposits money into it, the account tracks the net effect of all withdrawals and deposits using a numeric quantity called a 'balance'. The account will also contain a list of all events (Withdrawals, deposits, fees, etc) that resulted in the balance. This state information is typically captured by product-specific systems in a bank or FSI. For example, there is a lending system that captures details of loans, and a current account system that captures details of checking and savings accounts, which are distinct products. In both cases, the accounts are governed by contracts, which refer to the terms and conditions governing business on that account.
  • Reference/Master Data: Events and state refer to 'business activities' of a bank or FSI. To provide more detail on these, banks need to capture additional data that provides context for these activities. This data may be variously called as 'reference data' or 'master data', and covers various business dimensions of a given transaction or account. For example – a bank has a master list of products that it sells to customers (Product Master). Similarly, it has a list of customers (Customer master). A trading firm may hold a list of securities it transacts in (Securities master). These and other lists provide context for each business transaction or account. Banks typically maintain 'Master' data for this purpose.

With this background, the following lists the key categories of business data and reference data in the staging data model.