ISDA®                 

INTERNATIONAL SWAPS AND DERIVATIVES ASSOCIATION

NEWS RELEASE

 

For Immediate Release Friday, May 3, 2002

For More Information, Please Contact:

Stacy Carey, ISDA New York, (212) 901-6000; Fax (212) 901-6001; scarey@isda.org

 

ISDA ISSUES CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

FpML WORKING GROUP TO EXTEND EQUITY DERIVATIVES COVERAGE

 

NEW YORK, Friday, May 3, 2002 - The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) today issued a call for participation for the Equity Derivatives Working group for the Financial products Markup Language (FpML) standard. FpML is the XML-based, freely licensed, e-commerce standard supporting OTC trading of financial derivatives.

 

After the inclusion of the basic equity derivatives in FpML Version 3.0, the working group intends to cover more exotic equity derivatives. “There is interest in the industry for equity derivative coverage and a great deal of momentum within the working group,” said Brian Lynn, Co-Chair of the FpML Standards Committee and Vice President e-Trading, Cross-Business e-Commerce group for JP Morgan Chase.

 

The working group plans to immediately start work on version 4.0 of the standard focusing on inclusion of option features such as Asians, Barriers, Baskets, Bermudans, Binaries, Quantos, Composites, different forms of deferred term options and different option trading strategies. “We are pleased with the continued progress of FpML in the area of equity derivatives and the success of the FpML working group in developing products in coordination with the ISDA documentation working group,” said Robert G. Pickel, Executive Director and CEO of ISDA. ISDA’s documentation working group on equity derivatives is currently reviewing the Equity Definitions.

 

The charter of the Equity Derivatives working group and the full scope of the work for version 4.0 can be found at: www.fpml.org/wg/wglist/eqwg.html Parties interested in participating in this working group should complete the form available on the FpML website: Working Group Signup.  The time commitment for this working group is one-half a day a week.

 

FpML is a business information exchange standard for electronic dealing and processing of financial derivatives instruments. It establishes the industry protocol for sharing information on, and dealing in, financial derivatives over the Internet. It is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language), the standard meta-language for describing data shared between applications. All categories of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives will eventually be incorporated into the standard.

 

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