earticle

영어

Securities lending plays an important role in supporting financial markets. For example, it can improve market liquidity, potentially reducing the cost of trading and increasing market efficiency. However, by increasing the interconnections between institutions, it can pose potential risks to financial stability, which are exacerbated by a lack of transparency in the securities lending market. Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, market participants have attempted to address some of these risks, and fundamental changes to market infrastructure are being discussed, such as the use of central counterparties (CCPs). Introduced in 2009 in both Europe and the US in collaboration with electronic trading platform providers, CCPs act as legal counterparties between lenders and borrowers and take responsibility for all the obligations related to securities lending transactions. Thus, CCPs mitigate the counterparty risk and the credit exposures for individual market participants and significantly reduce systemic risk for the market as a whole. That is, introducing a CCP into the market means that a lender has no credit exposure to a borrower and vice versa. This exposure is transferred to the CCP (or clearing member of the CCP). In principle, the standardization of counterparty credit risk through the CCP could facilitate wider market access to create the development of securities lending transactions. Lent securities would be delivered from the lender to borrower via their respective clearing members and the CCP. Collateral securities or cash would move in the opposite direction from the borrower to the CCP via the borrower's clearing member. Depending on the arrangements of the CCP, those collateral securities would be available to the lender in the event of the failure of the CCP. This is critical time for the securities lending industry as markets begin to recover from the credit crisis, transparency and risk management become imperatives, short sale and related lending practices come under unprecedented scrutiny and institutional investors re-examine the opportunities and risks inherent in securities lending. The author believes that the broad adoption of CCPs in securities lending is not only inevitable but provides a major opportunity to reduce systemic risk, increases participant earnings and reduces the industry's cost structure. This article recommends that any CCP should not limit the maximum trade size, offer transparent membership criteria for clearing and non-clearing members, accept both trades from all securities lending platforms and trades conducted bilaterally and so on.