Template:M summ Equity Derivatives 1.12

Section 1.12 Confirmations

Now back in the day, counterparties exchanged long-form conformations starting out “Dear Ladies and Gentlemen”, and cleaved to a long and tedious form, but in the quick-fire HFT world of Equity Derivatives it quickly became apparent this was quite the waste of trees: Transactions tend to be vanilla, delta-one and traded in high volumes.

Thus, ISDA-sponsored “master confirmations” quickly emerged — sort of intermediate steps between a Schedule and a trade Confirmation allowing parties to agree general terms up front, so the process of confirming was nothing more than a spreadsheet or .xml file exchanged at the end of each day.

Prime brokers developed their own synthetic equity swap master confirmations — somewhat more bespoke than the ISDA MCs, with a further level of standardisation of currencies and tenors, designed to replicate cash equity trading as nearly as possible.

All of these things count as Confirmations. No doubt some bright spark will try to do something one day on a blockchain. What is that? Oh, yes, sorry — not blockchain: ChatGPT. Keep up at the back.