Template:M summ 2002 ISDA Unpaid Amounts

If you think of an ISDA Transaction as comprising offsetting payment streams, these payments fall into one of three ontological categories:

• Been and gone: Those that are already paid: settled, gone, checked into the hereafter; on permanent location in that foreign country we call the past — we care less about these; they are but a fossil record: they pose no risk, attract no capital and excite no prospects of revenue or compensation.
• Yet to come: Due to be paid, or delivered, at a specified date in the future. Perhaps fixed; perhaps yet to be determined, but conceptually still out there. It is, conventionally, by off setting the provisional present value of these future cashflows, that we value “the Transaction” — this is what we call its “replacement cost”.
• The twilight zone: That weird inter-regnum of payments whose due date has passed, and which should have have been paid, and thus emigrated permanently to that foreign country but, for whatever reason — inattention, inability, defiance, or the affordances of Section 2(a)(iii) — they have not yet been made, so they need to be worried about, accounted for and factored into things, over and above the “replacement” value of the trade.