Over 600 collateral professionals came together at Square Convention Centre situated in the historical and cultural heart of Brussels for the Euroclear Collateral Conference 2024 on 14-15 November.
Valérie Urbain, CEO of Euroclear, welcomed everyone to the 2024 edition of the Euroclear Collateral Conference. She reflected on fifty plus years of collaboration and partnership with clients that has enabled Euroclear to deliver innovative solutions within a secure and regulated ecosystem.
She highlighted Euroclear’s move to become a digital and data-enabled FMI and the Collateral Highway’s goal of shaping the industry to becoming the industry standard for client experience, service excellence, resilience and innovation.
Panels write-ups and recordings
The never normal – Embracing change in repo
We have moved from collateral scarcity to collateral availability but there remain challenges in redistributing excess Eurosystem liquidity and European regulation needs to recognize developments in other jurisdictions if Europe is to remain competitive.
Beyond boundaries – Growth opportunities through expanding collateral horizons
As Europe turns eastward for future growth opportunities, some markets have standardized regulations, some markets have restricted FX markets and in the middle ground are markets in progress of internationalizing and offer exciting opportunities.
The post-trade key – Unlocking capital markets potential
Integrated and open capital markets are the key to making Europe competitive, however European capital markets are fragmented and little more than the sum of the block’s national capital markets. There is a new urgency for change and the move to T+1 could be a catalyst for change.
From storm clouds to silver linings – Rethinking securities financing post QT
The securities-financing industry’s vital signs are strong, with higher balances as collateral abundance replaces collateral scarcity but lower revenues and geopolitical instability means a focus on short-term lending with longer tenors is now more challenging to achieve.
Orchestrating collateral intelligence through technology and data
Technology can address many of the challenges facing the securities-financing industry but it is not the panacea. The chief hurdle remains fragmentation, with interoperability across the multiple proprietary systems and platforms being a significant challenge to overcome.
Collateral Highway
Marije Verhelst, head of Product Strategy and Product Development Collateral Management and Securities Lending, began the Euroclear update by expressing her heartfelt thanks to clients for their ongoing business leading to a year-on-year growth of 17% on the Collateral Highway across the main business lines of triparty repo, securities lending and derivatives.
She proceeded to outline exciting product updates supported by a multi-year investment plan designed to transform the Collateral Highway by aiming to set the industry benchmark in client experience, service excellence, innovation and resilience for the collateral ecosystem.
The Collateral Highway is one of Euroclear’s biggest data-enabled services and increasingly clients recognize the importance of accessing and leveraging their collateral data and the data strategy is to deliver purpose-fit data in the form needed, through a variety of different channels. Data will also be used to develop value-added services.
Verhelst also announced that we will deliver our own fully fledged collateral optimization service combining real-time client specific data with Euroclear data to achieve the best possible collateral allocations. This service will be delivered in partnership with Transcend, a leading provider of optimization services.
“We are also continuously enhancing our collateral allocation engine, AutoSelect, to reduce fails and credit usage, and increase flexibility and predictability for dealers,” Euroclear wrote.
Special interest sessions on Africa and China
Vera Songwe, chair and founder of the Liquidity and Sustainability Facility, joined the conference remotely from Cop29 in Azerbaijan to share her insights on the latest developments in African repo while Mr Zong Jun, Vice President at China Central Depository & Clearing Co. Ltd. highlighted Asian market trends with the insights from East Asia session on day 2 of the conference.
Closing out the conference, Nicolas Hamilton gave an inspirational talk on how he has overcome the challenges of living with cerebral palsy and how we should never let limits set by others define us, as only we can determine the limits of our potential.