Continued growth in cleared derivatives and the implementation of new margining rules for non-cleared derivatives from September 2016 have resulted in significant changes in collateral practices. These changes are another important step forward in financial regulatory reform efforts.
To assess their impact, ISDA has relaunched its annual Margin Survey. The survey analyzes the amount and type of initial margin (IM) and variation margin (VM) posted for non-cleared and cleared derivatives transactions.
The survey finds that approximately $1.41 trillion of collateral has been posted by market participants with central counterparties (CCPs) for their cleared derivatives transactions and with the 20 largest market participants for their non-cleared derivatives trades.
Of this amount, IM and VM posted for cleared derivatives totals $434 billion, and for non-cleared derivatives totals $977.5 billion.
Broken out by initial and variation margin, IM posted totals $280.5 billion, with $173.4 billion for cleared and $107.1 billion for non-cleared. Variation margin posted totals $1.13 trillion, with $260.8 billion for cleared and $870.4 billion for non-cleared.
Documents (1) for ISDA Margin Survey 2017
Latest
The CPI Quandary
The recent US government shutdown didn’t just create weeks of political drama – it also left inflation-linked swaps dealers with a major headache: how should they determine an initial value for new trades given the US Bureau of Labor Statistics...
ISDA Response to HMT, BoE on UK CCPs
On November 18, ISDA submitted its responses to the Bank of England (BoE) consultation on ensuring the resilience of central counterparties (CCPs) and the UK Treasury’s (HMT) two draft CCP statutory instruments (SIs). These consultations form part of the update...
Doubling Down on Appropriate Trading Book Capital
Throughout ISDA’s 40th anniversary year, we’ve been reflecting on the quest for greater consistency and efficiency that underpins everything we’ve achieved since 1985. It was at the heart of the original efforts to bring greater standardization to the nascent derivatives...
Determining Initial Reference Index for New Trades
On November 25, 2025, ISDA published a Market Practice Note (MPN) to recommend a specific methodology that market participants could elect to use for the purposes of determining the Initial Reference Index for certain new inflation derivative transactions given that...
