Chair: What should the industry’s priorities be over the next year?




Noren: Three things – collaboration, the Shareholder Rights Directive and industrialisation – with collaboration top of the list. The industry cannot afford to live with interpretation issues. To wake up one day and realise that you are not compliant with a regulation, when you thought that you were, is not a good thing. So it has to be a broader and deepened dialogue within the industry, industry organisations and with regulators.

One threat that we have not discussed is the Shareholder Rights Directive, which could easily develop into an administrative reporting nightmare.

The industry also needs to discuss much more thoroughly its service and pricing models, especially when it comes to risk assumptions, capital usage and liquidity usage. This is particularly important when models are becoming more and more unbundled.

Now, it is not a given that everything will continue to work the way it has done for the broker-dealer and the investment banking community if a substantial part of the activity flow is lost. So the final point is industrialisation. So we must get down to the nitty-gritty of things and aim for operational perfection.

We have been quite comfortable with seeing 3% fail rates, 99.6% straight through processing rates and so on. Now we need to go down to the smallest component of every service and tick the box that it is industrialised and requires no manual integration, removing the provider and the buying client any problems arising from how you process it.

Harris: Central clearing – and everything it entails, such as the collateral and the cost – is still the big item on the radar, especially with a mandatory deadline of maybe Q1 next year for Europe. We would like to see a little bit more clarification from the European Securities and Markets Authority around clearing under Emir. We would particularly like to have more clarity and detail from regulators, rather than rules that require a large degree of interpretation. Even now, we can pick up the phone to four or five different people and get four or five different answers.

Nabi: Out main priority is how we can effectively focus on delivering more services, more capabilities and more efficiencies, and bringing these together in a way that makes sense for clients, whether they are on the sell side or buy side.