CAS was born in the secondary markets of the residential mortgage industry, and this very fact led to the development of a generalized tool suitable for all types of collateral and, indeed, data analysis of generic tabular data, from baseball statistics to HTTP log files.
Residential mortgage data, to this day, is stored and transferred in a virtually infinite variety of formats. This is true despite massive and costly efforts to standardize data in XML.
This plethora of data formats, combined with the ever-increasing variety of mortgage products, all multiplied by the different types of industry players, meant that CAS needed to have the flexibility of a spreadsheet, allowing analysts to do just-in-time column naming, formatting, calculations, and reporting.
To manage this flexibility, and not have it devolve into the common problem of spreadsheet chaos, CAS provides both the structure of a database management system and the tools necessary to coordinate work across analysts and the enterprise. These tools allow the team to ensure that data, calculations, and reports are defined consistently.
Thus CAS provides the analyst the ability to handle constantly changing business requirements in real time and, simultaneously, the enterprise the ability to ensure consistency and accountability.