SingleDealerPlatforms.Org

Some interesting findings from a paper from the Bank of England, which looked at the impact of mandatory trading on swap execution facilities (SEF), for interest rate swaps (IRS) as required under Dodd Frank Act.

The paper looked at transactional data from the USD and EUR segments of the plain vanilla IRS market. The findings showed that as a result of SEF trading:

• Activity increases
• Liquidity improves across the swap market
• Improvement being largest for USD mandated contracts which are most affected by the mandate
• The reduction in execution costs is economically significant
• Execution costs in USD mandated contracts, drop for market end-users alone, by $3 million–$4 million daily relative to EUR mandated contracts and in total by about $7 million–$13 million daily
• Inter-dealer activity drops concurrently with the improvement in liquidity suggesting that execution costs may have fallen because dealer intermediation chains became shorter

Overall, the results suggest that:

“The improvements in transparency brought about by the Dodd-Frank trading mandate have substantially improved interest rate swap market liquidity.

Finally, the report finds that the Dodd-Frank mandate caused the activity of the EUR segment of the market to geographically fragment. However, this does not appear to have compromised liquidity.

Full report here

Filed under: Dodd Frank, OTC, Paul Blank, Regulation, SEF |