ICMA Podcast

ICMA’s Katie Kelly on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the finance industry with specific reference to initiatives in this area at the Banque de France.

In the ICMA Quarterly Report, the Quarterly Assessment is about the transition away from LIBOR to risk-free rates in the bond market. The Quarterly Assessment is introduced in this podcast by ICMA's Paul Richards, Head of Market Practice and Regulatory Policy.

ICMA’s Andy Hill, Secretary, ICMA Secondary Market Practices Committee, updates on the European Commission’s proposal for a revised mandatory buy-in framework and next steps.

ICMA’s, Nicholas Pfaff, Head of Sustainable Finance, summarises in this podcast the key points and recommendations from ICMA’s recent paper on “Ensuring the usability of the EU Taxonomy” also covered in a feature in this edition of the Quarterly Report.

ICMA's Charlotte Bellamy, Secretary to the ICMA Legal & Documentation Committee, provides an update on the current reviews of the Prospectus Regulations in the EU and UK focusing on the key issues for ICMA primary markets members.

ICMA’s Ruari Ewing, Secretary, ICMA Primary Market Practices Committee, talks about ICMA’s response to the FCA’s consultation on a new UK consumer duty, which welcomed the FCA’s intention to exempt both vanilla retail bonds and institutional bonds from the scope of the new duty but raised concerns about the insufficiently narrow calibration of the drafting of these proposed exemptions.

Towards the end of 2021, the European Commission published its proposed amendments to MiFIR as part of the overall CMU package announcements. However, ICMA has suggested modifications to some of the European Commission’s proposals. ICMA's Liz Callaghan, Secretary, ICMA Electronic Trading Council, speaks about these recommendations concern pre- and post-trade transparency as well as the analysis required for a successful bond consolidated tape, the vehicle for transparency, to emerge.

On 1 February 2022, on the day of the go-live of CSDR cash penalties, ICMA’s European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) released its discussion paper, Optimising Settlement Efficiency, aiming to focus attention on key opportunities to strengthen settlement efficiency in Europe. ICMA's Alex Westphal, Secretary to the ERCC, provides some background to the initiative and briefly walks through the key take aways from the paper and next steps.

ICMA’s Gabriel Callsen, Secretary, ICMA Fintech Advisory Committee, speaks about phase 2 of the Common Domain Model (CDM), which seeks to promote electronification of repo markets, notably open, floating-rate and evergreen repos, and how to become involved in this cross-industry initiative.

Repo expert and author of ICMA’s Guide to Best Practice in European Repo Markets, Richard Comotto, draws on his experience to highlight the challenges faced by frontier markets in trying to build successful new repo markets, including lack of an active interbank money market, illiquid collateral and legal obstacles.