Regulations are having a profound effect on the trading landscape alongside a proliferation of Codes of Conduct. In the UK, there are three codes replacing the former NIPS code covering FX, Money Markets and Precious Metals.
We have been seeing a lot of discussion and interest concerning a blog I penned in March last year under the title of “Beware the Ides of March - A Drama of FX Swaps Reporting”.
This March, we had a Consultation from ESMA, nattily entitled, “MiFID II/MiFIR review report on the transparency regime for non-equity instruments and the trading obligation for derivatives”, which may equally be causing this issue to be re-visited.
It would have been one thing pondering on how to deal with a misdirection of Cupid’s bow recently on St. Valentine’s Day. But, instead, how do your customers react, when attempting to book a deal on-line, when a quoted price is rejected? It can often lead to confusion and leave a negative feeling if not properly understood as to why it occurred.
This week I have been dusting off the Q&A release from ESMA in September 2018 regarding the reporting of FX Swaps to ensure we have successfully planned for the impending changes. The aforementioned Q&A included reference data and transaction reporting scenarios where an FX Swap is reported as a single stand-alone financial instrument. This Q&A implementation period was six months and to ensure a consistent approach across reporting requirements, ESMA also published a Q&A on FX Swaps reporting under EMIR, which should be implemented 12 months after its publication, as it is more difficult to implement, but the two are harmonised to ensure consistency.
Last week we looked at the recent GFXC note on Disclosures and today we take a deep dive into the accompanying report. As will be seen, it continues the theme of the importance of disclosures.
Not if - it’s the clarity of content that counts for FX Disclosures!
The Global FX Committee released the minutes of their last meeting, papers on Cover & Deal, Disclosures and a survey on Valentine’s Day. It makes for interesting reading for the FX market and luckily, on the 90th anniversary of the Valentine’s Day Massacre no bullets were fired!
With FX volatility now rising rapidly our three fintech entrepreneurs were planning how to disrupt the Foreign Exchange market (the only financial market that runs for 24 hours per day) with a revolutionary ‘follow-the-sun’ app. They were planning to set up a global, low-cost, transparent, real-time, digital, blockchain exchange staffed by robots.
The American Foreign Exchange Committee (FXC) has issued one of its letters last week addressed to all “Market Participants”. The FXC is an FX industry group that has been providing guidance to the market since 1978.
In today’s banking industry many organisations are finding it increasingly challenging to meet the transparency requirements imposed on them. It arguably feels like a fusillade of bullets coming from all sides. Central banks, regulators, internal requirements, auditors, and others, are all imposing their own compliance and risk practices, to which banks must adhere or face the consequences and potentially pay a hefty price in regulatory fines.
How can technology support the principle of ‘fair and effective markets’?
In my last blog on cross border payments I was mulling the concept of “fair and effective” markets and musing how that would apply to the current landscape of high bank charges in this area. The original blog was inspired by a newspaper article that was expressing outrage that a bank was discriminating against smaller corporates (SME’s) on a systematic basis.
