Introduction

Financial systems depend on structured information whose meaning must remain stable across institutions, systems, technologies, jurisdictions, and time. These systems process financial facts, control instructions, interpretation results, policy decisions, release actions, audit records, provenance records, and evidence. The architecture must keep these concerns distinct so financial systems can remain governable, traceable, interoperable, and adaptable.

The Financial Systems Archetype applies the SDIS/SIP-RA discipline to the financial domain. Part 0 explains the document set and the onion structure used to separate conceptual architecture, logical architecture, domain profiles, implementation profiles, deployment profiles, testability, and evidence. This part defines the conceptual layer at the centre of that onion.

This part establishes the concepts that the later parts use to define logical models, domain profiles, implementation mappings, deployment models, and evidence plans. It defines the classification model for financial systems, including ecosphere, ecosystem, and domain. It also defines core concepts such as Node, Node Role, Node Identity, Communication Endpoint, Data Structure Definition, Data Structure Instance, Runtime Plane, Evidence, Traceability, and Separation of Concerns.

This part deliberately avoids technology-specific bindings. Later parts may map a Communication Endpoint to a DDS Topic, a Data Structure Definition to an IDL structure, a Node to a Python process packaged as an OCI-compatible container image, or a deployment profile to Kubernetes or K3s. Those mappings realise the conceptual architecture for a specific purpose. They do not redefine the conceptual architecture.