Amsterdam Roundtable | Euroclear Collateral Conference 2018 | OMFIF
The first two full weeks in November saw the end of our outreach program for the year, with our final roundtable of 2018, a number of key meetings and engagements as well as the formal communication of our main conference in June 2019.
The 8 November saw our last roundtable of the year in Amsterdam, with over 35 delegates attending the session in the CIRCL, eco-friendly facilities kindly provided by ABN AMRO. The theme around the location was continued into our agenda, with a fascinating review of sustainability given by Dr Roland Mees, Director at ING Wholesale Banking Sustainable Finance on the impact this ethos is bringing to our world.
On 16 November, I co-moderated a session at the annual Euroclear Collateral Conference. As always, a really well executed event with great attendance. In terms of the panel discussion, a wide ranging debate across the entire securities lending value chain, with strong voices representing the supply and demand side. During the session, we covered amongst other things, the constraints put on the intermediaries in the market around capital and RWA management, as well as the various new routes to market that may help alleviate these pressures. We moved onto to looking at the current regulatory landscape, where the panel acknowledged many of the benefits that these will bring around transparency and settlement discipline.
That brings me onto some of the initial conversations that ISLA has begun on both advocacy and the association’s broader messaging into 2019. Firstly, we met with Pooma Kumis at OMFIF, who many of you will remember provided a fascinating opening keynote address at our recent Post Trade conference. Both institutions and their respective clients and members are looking at very similar challenges and opportunities across financial markets, and we will therefore be working more closely on many of these into next year and beyond. Ahead of the Euroclear event, I also took the opportunity to catch up with our friends at Fleishman Hillard, and our initial thoughts around a narrative ahead of the new Commission commencing its term in November 2019.
Finally, I am delighted that our annual conference will be returning to Madrid in June 2019. Madrid is one of the largest and most important regional capitals in Europe, and in line with our continuing efforts to broaden participation in the Spanish market, this couldn’t come at a more opportune moment.
Andrew Dyson, CEO
