For Immediate Release Friday, August 1, 2003
For More Information, Please Contact:
Industry
Achieves Confirmation Processing Goals for Core Products,
Maintains
Focus on Improvements
The
2003 Survey reports that, during calendar year 2002, participating firms met
their objective of producing confirmations by five days after trade date (T+5) for
forward rate agreements (FRAs), vanilla swaps and
commodity derivatives. Confirmation dispatch times for less standardized
products such as credit and equity derivatives also improved last year.
Responses show that 83 percent of credit derivative and 84 percent of equity
derivative confirmations are sent out in the T+5 target time.
“The
derivatives industry continues to improve its operational processing
performance and to set and meet more stringent goals,” said
Responses to the Survey demonstrate a general decrease in confirmations outstanding -- that is, confirmations sent but not yet completed -- across product areas. The most significant decrease has been in outstanding equity derivative confirmations among all sizes of responding firms. Also, approximately 90 percent of large firms report they have a formal escalation procedure in place to deal with outstanding confirmations, while 55 percent of all firms reporting such procedures apply risk weighting to prioritize these.
The
Survey results also show that automation, including use of Financial
products Markup Language (FpML), continued to
increase steadily. While FRAs and currency options
show the highest overall degree of current automation, with 22 percent of
respondents auto-matching at least 50 percent of their confirmations, plans for
automating credit derivative processes are among institutions’ priorities.
Results show that 47 percent of respondents plan to increase automation of
credit derivative matching capabilities in 2003. Plans to enhance automation of
plain vanilla swaps focus on the transfer of trade data from the operations
system to the general ledger, sending of confirmations, and matching of confirmation
details.
ISDA’s annual Operations Benchmarking Survey, initiated in
2000, identifies and tracks operations processing trends in the privately
negotiated derivatives industry. The results provide individual firms with a
benchmark against which to measure the promptness and accuracy of their trade
data capture, confirmation procedures, and settlement. As in past years,
individual respondents receive a feedback report that compares their data with
those of respondents of similar size and with those of the entire respondent
population. The entire survey can be
accessed in the Latest News section of ISDA’s web
site at www.isda.org.
ISDA is the global trade association representing leading participants in the privately negotiated derivatives industry. ISDA was chartered in 1985, and today has more than 600 member institutions from 46 countries on six continents. These members include most of the world's major institutions that deal in privately negotiated derivatives, as well as many of the businesses, governmental entities and other end users that rely on over-the-counter derivatives to manage efficiently the financial market risks inherent in their core economic activities. Information about ISDA and its activities is available on the Association's web site: www.isda.org.
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