ISLA’s Annual General Meeting (AGM) will showcase the work carried out by the Association during 2022. Amongst other things, this will include key priorities, achievements, and deliverables.

With inflation at its highest for several decades, and global governments grappling with souring energy prices, amongst other challenges, this session will look at the macro-economic landscape, and the real implications for us all, including financial markets.

In a slight change to this regular session, we invite senior representatives from across the various business-types to discuss internal and external factors and strategies around business, trading and product, that are influencing their groups, including legacy issues that they continue to live with. Has the cost of operations increased in line with volumes and regulatory obligations? Has their work become progressively complex? Why can’t the market, with technology solutions, settle everything and make CSDR obsolete?

The pre-contractual stage within post trade processing, which is all about knowing your client (KYC) and the exchange of documentation, continues to be a known bottleneck, causing significant delays in trading with new counterparts, lost revenues and trading opportunities, as well as the range of counterparts when we consider best execution. This panel will consider the causes to these effects, whether the agency lending model adds a unique challenge to KYC and onboarding, and if or how they can truly be solved.

The securities lending trade lifecycle, from initiation to lifecycle, has become a highly choreographed and increasingly complex, confusing process. Will we ever achieve instant settlement and ‘settlement finality’ so to speak? With increasing volumes, and CSDR now providing real-world costs, how does our market address today’s low settlement rates? This session will consider how current trading practices and processes must adapt, to reflect the realities of the new world.

The opening session of the afternoon will look at the occurrence and management of lifecycle events, including collateral management and corporate actions. In addition to immediate challenges associated with open leg fails around collateral mobility, further pressures are building around the use of collateral for the purposes of derivatives clearing as well as the additional complexities represented by sustainability collateral. Here, we will debate how we improve collateral mobility, including the role of new technologies, including tokenisation.

Leading senior market participants will assess the realities of the diversity and inclusion debate, and how their firms are advocating for real change.

The penultimate panel will look at the future of securities servicing more broadly, as it has to consider how it responds to institutional investors’ desire to actively participate in digital and crypto-type assets. Alongside the traditional asset classes and the aforementioned stages of the securities ending lifecycle, it is crucial that the industry recognises the shortcomings of the existing operational framework and avoids repeating the mistakes of the past.

Drawing upon the overall conference, this final session will pull the themes and threads of the day together.