Derivs - Regulation

Sharon Bowen, from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, issued a statement on January 22 arguing that the retail FX market was the least regulated part of the derivatives industry, following the shock move on January 15 by the Swiss National Bank to abandon the Sfr1.20 euro/Swiss franc exchange rate peg. However, lawyers argue that retail FX is one of the most heavily regulated sectors, which may in fact be increasing risk.

John Grace, ex-senior managing director at AIG, has joined the Options Clearing Corporation as executive vice president and chief risk officer.

The Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) has established a pre-funded $1bn committed repurchase facility with a leading pension fund in order to increase the central counterparty’s overall liquidity resources from $2bn to $3bn.

Overall interest rate derivatives trading that was reported to swap data repositories last week increased by 14% from the previous week, according to data from the International Swaps and Derivatives Association.

CLS Group and TriOptima have teamed up to offer an FX forward compression service in order to address the regulatory requirement for financial counterparties to have procedures in place to analyse the possibility of portfolio compression for non-centrally cleared over-the-counter derivatives.

A memorandum of understanding from the European Securities and Markets Authority recognising the Hong Kong clearing regime as equivalent to the European regime under European Markets Infrastructure Regulation is not enough to avoid fragmenting the market, according to lawyers, who said ESMA must prioritise the key issue of US clearing house equivalence.

The International Swaps and Derivatives Association has reshuffled its organisational structure to better respond to cross-border issues. Steven Kennedy, ex-head of strategy, research and communications at ISDA, is now global head of public policy. ISDA has also created a regulatory and legal practice group based in Washington DC in addition to a non-cleared margin implementation initiative.

The way that firms report trade and transaction data under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive could converge before the implementation of MiFID II in January 2017.

Derivatives end users in the US and Asia are likely to face the biggest hurdles complying with the clearing mandate under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation when it kicks in towards the end of this year, according to lawyers.

2014 continued to be an active year for financial regulation in the EU, with a push to finalise much of the outstanding primary legislation on the regulatory reform agenda and to move towards implementation of regulation already in place. The derivatives market will be particularly affected by the new regulatory landscape and the market will face many new challenges in 2015 and beyond.

Under MiFID II, forward contracts as currently defined will be considered financial instruments, which is raising significant concerns for commodity derivatives market participants as they will be subject to regulation that they weren’t previously.

Concerns are rising among market participants that the European Securities and Markets Authority is showing a lack of understanding of request-for-quote and other trading protocols as it prepares new rules. If ESMA imposes overly-restrictive transparency regulations on these technical systems, market participants may refrain from using them, according to lawyers.