The strategic objectives of the LMA are to promote and enable liquidity, efficiency, and transparency in the EMEA loan markets. You will have seen communications about our focus on loan markets’ primary and secondary operations with market guidelines published on Primary Delayed Settlement Compensation and the commitment to reduce secondary settlement times by 25% over the course of 2024 supported by our new periodical Challenging the Timeline.
However, we must not ignore the critical work of our member agency business lines and we are currently assessing what the LMA can and should do to support this. The LMA, as your loan market trade association, has immense power to drive market change and influence practices with the collaboration and support of our members. We are seeing that already in 2024 across our book of work and we trust this will continue through the rest of 2024 and into 2025.
Firstly, it is important to emphasise the agency business has not been ignored and we absolutely recognise the importance of the agency contribution. Our immediate priorities were to look at both primary and secondary operations and issuing guidance for Primary Delayed Settlement Compensation and working on reducing the secondary settlement timelines. There is still much to do to make them consistent operating practices, but we are making progress. This will allow time to assess what we do for our agent members.
Over the summer, our Chief Executive, Scott McMunn, has met a diverse group of agency teams bilaterally to discuss individual and market wide challenges. There was much praise for the work the LMA had historically carried out here, as well as a request to reconvene several of the outputs, specifically the EMEA Agents Group meeting, and indeed to look at some new areas of focus. These include market practices, documentation, technology, and the broad church of events and networking. We will review these over the remainder of 2024 and invite you to provide feedback directly. Any work undertaken has to demonstrate an impact and have a defined output. Please reach out to [email protected] or [email protected].
The LMA has established an Operations Committee which sets the agenda for all work on operations, settlement, and agency across our markets. The Committee will review the objectives of our activity and ensure that we assess and execute on those areas that align with the LMA key strategic objectives. To be clear this is just a naming convention, and it will cover Agency activities.
The Operations Committee will create a new Working Group early next year looking at:
- Operating practices
- Regulatory reform
- Events and networking
- Training, including juniors
- Technology
- Thought leadership and communications
- Documentation
- Horizon scanning/Market development
- Global connectivity, including LSTA and APLMA
The next steps are to ascertain the impact and benefit of any proposed work. The LMA has finite resource and capacity, and work will be prioritised according to impact. One immediate challenge is the breadth of activity, as we expect this to cover a significant geographic reach and involve many product lines. What has worked well in the other new LMA Committees has been having a small number of senior practitioners chaired by a Board member and supported by a senior LMA executive assess workflow through the lens of the LMA goals – what is needed versus what is nice to have.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all those market participants who helped provide education around the agency market and its work. This is highly appreciated.
