IMS Format is used to represent Interest Rate Swap (IRS) portfolios. IMS Format is a spreadsheet style format where the columns are used to describe the different trade attributes and the rows the individual trades.

An online demonstration that converts IMS Format to FpML is Swapsgen*  

The range of products that can be described by IMS Format 4 are:-

• Single Currency IRS
• Cross Currency IRS
• Forward Rate Agreements
• Overnight Index Swaps
• Zero Coupon Swaps
• Compounding Trades
• Non Standard Fixings
• IMM and End of Month
• Vanilla and Basis
• Fixed Amount Trades
• Additional Payments

IMS Format was first developed in 2001 and takes its name from the IMS application that was used for Backloading trades into the LCH.Clearnet SwapClear service from 2002. IMS was used by 19 of the worlds largest Banks and successfully reconciled more than 200,000 IRS trades. 

Since 2005 LCH.Clearnet have used the IMS Format alongside FpML to represent the auction files in the event of a SwapClear Member going into default.

At the end of 2008 IMS Format was successfully used to represent and auction more than 64,000 Interest Rate Swap trades.

*The online version of swapsgen uses IMS Format 1, which is a subset of IMS Format 4. Example files are provided with online demo.