EVENTS
New ISLA Technology Group
SunGard approached ISLA to propose the creation of a Technology Group in order to bring together market participants and vendors to agree standards relating to the communication of data within the securities finance community. An inaugural meeting was held, chaired by David Rule, and it was agreed that a group would be valuable and that the participant profile should be business analysts from lenders and borrowers (either in operations or IT), together with representatives from vendors (ISLA associate member firms). It was decided that the new group should report to the ISLA Operations group.
A number of items were discussed as suggestions for the types of topic to be tackled. These included:
- Agreeing message standards eg based on XML or Swift
- Agreeing a standard ISLA dictionary of terms
- Agreeing the attributes of transactions and trade life cycle events in new markets
- Standardization of reports from and connectivity with triparty agents in relation to collateral.
It was felt that the group could also liaise with existing groups such as SWIFT and FpML, which had approached ISLA before.
Following the initial meeting the formation of such a group was approved by ISLA Board. Martin Walker (Dresdner) was appointed chair of the new ISLA technology sub-group, and invitation have been sent to all ISLA member firms to attend a meeting of the group at ISLA's offices on Monday 21 July.