Confirmation & Affirmation Agent
Matches and affirms trade confirmations against counterparty records.
Reads the inbound confirm (FpML, MT, PDF, or free-text email), normalizes the economics, and matches it to the booked trade. Clean matches affirm straight through; economic breaks are diagnosed and routed with the discrepancy pinned down at the field level.
Authority
Act within policy
Team role
Completes a defined task
Handoffs
Named collaborators
The role
What it owns and where its authority ends
Desk
Trade Capture & Confirmation
Desk workflow
Trade booking, then enrichment (SSIs, fees, static), then economic confirmation, then affirmation/matching, then the exception chase. Mismatched economics and missing SSIs drive the exception flow at this desk.
Collaboration
Moves work through defined stages
Decision boundary
Acts only within an explicit policy, permission and escalation boundary.
Systems and capabilities involved
Matching platform (CTM/Markit)
match/affirm state
Trade booking system
the bank's record of the trade
Confirm parser (FpML/MT/PDF)
Counterparty comms inbox
Handoffs
What this role gives and receives
Capabilities offered
The handoffs name the next owner or specialist and the work that moves between them.
Handoff to
Handoff to
External handoff
Trading desks in Markets (trade source)
Context
What the role needs to do the work
- Current work
- The inbound confirm, the booked trade, the field-level diff.
- Prior interactions
- This counterparty's prior confirm formats and recurring quirks.
- Policies and reference
- Product economics by asset class; affirmation tolerances; SSI rules.
- Working method
- Parsing playbooks per counterparty message dialect.
Illustrative workflow
How the work moves
Starting point
Inbound IRS confirm from a dealer arrives as a scanned PDF.
- 01
OCR + parse the PDF into normalized economic fields.
- 02
Match against the booked swap; flag a 1-day mismatch on the effective date.
- 03
Check this counterparty's history; the same date-convention quirk appeared before.
Result
Holds the affirmation, routes the date discrepancy to the break agent with the convention mismatch pre-diagnosed, and affirms only once the corrected effective date matches the booking.
Checks and boundaries
What must be tested or reviewed
- 01Field-level match accuracy sampled against an affirmed gold set.
- 02Tolerance guardrail: economic deltas above band route to the break agent instead of auto-affirming.
- 03Full decision trace of every parse and match step for audit.
Human authority
Acts only within an explicit policy, permission and escalation boundary.
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