The International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc. (ISDA) and Markit have begun onboarding buy-side market participants to their joint technology solution for Dodd-Frank regulatory compliance.
The solution, ISDA Amend, allows swap market participants to amend multiple ISDA master agreements and other swaps agreements and to exchange bilaterally information required for External Business Conduct compliance for OTC derivatives transactions. The platform is built on Markit Document Exchange, the firms system for swaps market participants to manage counterparty documents.
ISDA has already released a Dodd-Frank Protocol allowing participants to amend master agreements through standardized know-your-customer questionnaires. Following that, buy-side firms can utilize ISDA Amend to identify and categorize legal entities or funds for reporting purposes.
We believe ISDA Amend is an effective solution to automate the information-gathering process and provide sharing of submitted data and documents to permissioned counterparties, says ISDA CEO Robert Pickel.
ISDA and Markit say a number of swaps dealers intend to use the solution, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Citi, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Nomura, RBS, Socit Gnrale, State Street and UBS.
The MDE platform is uniquely suited to managing the volume of changes to documentation required by Dodd-Frank, and with deadlines rapidly approaching, our solution helps the industry efficiently meet its commitments, says Lansing Gatrell, Director and Co-Head of Markit Document Exchange.
The firms expect the solution to be amended to facilitate regulatory compliance in other jurisdictions as rules governing OTC derivatives reporting are finalized.
In the U.S., swaps market participants must comply with Dodd-Franks External Business Conduct rules beginning October 14. The CFTC has mandated they use CFTC Interim Counterparty Identifiers, or CICIs, to identify counterparts in their reporting. SWIFT and DTCC launched the registration portal for CICIs today.
(CG)