The Asset Managers Forum is studying ways to automate swap confirms to recommend a best practice to its members. "The most pain and risk in swaps is the confirm process," said George Hall, v.p. at Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a co-chair of the AMF's swaps committee.
The documents for confirms are manual, sometimes they require several pages and must be delivered to several firms for agreement and signatures. Andrew Cross, attorney at Reed Smith and a committee member, said, "The paper thing is bad. But it is what we live with every day."