Industry association
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Those self-appointed keepers of the flames in the hearths of the different cottages that make up our industry. Traditionally thought of as bland, sleepy places, they are from time to time cast into the terrible glare of publicity, which generally doesn’t play out too well for them.
- ISDA: These days, probably the daddy, and copped less flack in the fallout from the CDO scandal than you might have expected. Executives from the BBA looked on enviously at the lack of attention ISDA garnered. Publishes the ISDA Master Agreement and loads and loads of tedious protocols
- FIA: The Futures Industry Association, an American association of exchange-traded derivatives fans, who recently gobbled up their British counterparts, the Futures and Options Association.
- ISLA: International Securities Lending Association. Publisher of the 2010 GMSLA, 2018 Pledge GMSLA and the American Master Securities Lending Agreement
- ICMA: International Capital Markets Association. Repos are their main bag. They publish the GMRA and MRA. Once were called the Bond Market Association
- UK Finance: The artist formerly known as the British Bankers’ Association. Their main contribution to the world of finance was, ah, LIBOR. Oh dear. Oh, dear, oh dear. Now they don’t touch interbank rates with a barge-pole — no-one would let them even if they wanted to — so they restrict their activities to “enhanc[ing] competitiveness, support[ing] customers and facilitating] innovation”. So that’s nice.
- Bundesverband deutscher Banken, fondly known as “Bankenverband” is the trade association for German banks, which publishes the various iterations of the deutscher rahmenvertrag, which is of course the German master agreement.
Fun fact: the collective noun for a group of industry associations — seldom used, because so rare and disconsolate are the circumstances in which they get together[1] — is a “torpidity”.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff
The most famous torpidity of all is the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Industry Associations, an august body comprising personnel from usually-sworn-enemy organisations like ISDA, ICMA, ISLA and FIA, who convened for a beautiful moment of no-mans-land-Christmas-football in 2015 to formulate the Article 15 SFTR disclosure document, a fifteen-page, 5,000 word exercise in stating the bleeding obvious.
See also
References
- ↑ Such as drafting a standard disclosure notice that stock lenders could send to each other advising themselves that their title transfer arrangements are arrangements involving the transfer of title