The regulatory push to require market participants to provide collateral for uncleared swaps hit home for many firms with the March 1 deadline this year.
The good news is that it appears that may firms have not yet taken their foot off the brake since that deadline, says Stephen Bruel, a vice president at Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), and global Head of the Derivatives and Collateral Management product groups.
Bruel spoke to FTF News during the DerivOps North America 2017 conference in Chicago early last month, where he was a panelist for the “Looking back on the “Big Wave” of Variation Margin rules – Lessons Learned and a look ahead for Collateral Management.
The March deadline also opened the door for initial and variation margining rules that impact asset managers and sell-side firms.
“I think overall the implementation went better than expected. But there were certainly a lot of challenges. And there certainly was a lot of work to get there,” Bruel tells FTF News. “When you think about the amount of documents that had to be re-papered — it was over 100,000 agreements in the industry that had to change — some people thought that there weren’t enough lawyers in the world to handle that volume.”
At BBH, Bruel oversees BBH’s strategy, including product development and prioritization of capital and technology investments, bank officials say. He joined BBH six years ago after serving as a research director in the securities and investment practice of market research firm TowerGroup.
Click here to learn about FTF’s CMD Ops 2017 conference (collateral, margining, derivatives) to get the latest on the overlapping complexities of derivatives operations and collateral management. At this one-day conference, FTF will breakdown the challenge via industry experts, market participants and problem solvers who will delve into the burdens of “derivops” and the wise use of collateral.
CREDITS:
Video Production: Janene Knox and William J. Poznanski, Jr.
Interview conducted by: Eugene Grygo, chief content officer, FTF News
Co-Producers: Sarah Hathaway, vice president, Financial Technologies Forum (FTF) and Eugene Grygo
Need a Reprint?
Leave a Reply