Repo - The Unsung Hero of Capital Markets (ICMA AGM 2019)

Godfried De Vidts, Senior Advisor at ICMA and Regulatory Advisor at TransFICC moderated a panel at the ICMA AGM in Stockholm. In his introduction to the session Martin Scheck, Chief Executive ICMA, called Repo, “the unsung hero of capital markets.”

The panel was titled: Collateral damage? Opportunities and risks for the repo market in today's collateralised financial market system.

An interesting discussion followed, with the following highlights -

Grigorios Markouizos, Global Head of FI, Finance and Collateral Management at Citigroup raised concerns about infrastructure not keeping pace with market developments and resolution regimes/backstops for the buyside.

Richard Hochreutiner, Head of Global Collateral at Swiss Re asked if the CCP was a single point of failure.

Richard Comotto, Senior Consultant at ICMA, thought that SFTR regulation was pushing market participants to update systems, but had reservations about the CSDR regulation.

Andreas Biewald, Head of Short Term Funding, Commerzbank said that ‘digitalisation was urgently needed’ and tokenisation will help ease collateral movement issues.

John Berrigan, Deputy Director-General, Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union, European Commission also responded to Godfried’s question, “Why don’t we have a European Government Bond?”. John stated it was a strong theoretical idea but very difficult to implement due to European charter and physical co-ordination issues.

The conference was very interesting and busy. More information is available at https://www.icmagroup.org/events/AGM2019/