Dear members
First of all, I’d like to wish you all a happy Easter. I’m writing this just after the long weekend, and the clocks have gone forward in the UK. As the days get longer, the LMA team is busy delivering on our programme of advocacy, resources and events for you, our members.
I am pleased to say that we recorded continued and strong growth in new members during the first quarter, with firms from a broad range of geographies and sectors joining the LMA. That points to increased awareness of, and support for, our efforts to represent all participants in the EMEA loan markets.
- Martin Leuhrs (Morgan Stanley),
- Doug Laurie (Barclays) and
- Paul Gibbons (SMBC).
I mentioned in my last note we would have more new initiatives to reveal this month, specifically around secondary trading. A big thank you to my Board and many of you who were involved in some of our discovery work, which has led to an ambitious project plan aimed at reducing the average settlement time by 25% in 2024. We will seek to achieve this goal by driving behavioural change through a combination of education, best practice guidance, market intelligence and data. Technology solutions will also overlay and support the permanence of the work.
We have created a small Oversight Committee to support and challenge the Working Groups underneath. These WGs have still to be fully formed but this will get underway this month. The Operations Conference in June will support these workstreams and allow greater debate and interaction.
The LMA has also worked with some of you to reach consensus on providing guidance on Primary Delayed Settlement Compensation. This has been worked on for some time and I would like to offer another big thank you to the Working Group who made this possible, supported by Nick Voisey at the LMA. There is still much to do and we will support the guidelines with a series of webinars and FAQs over the next month or two. We will also be tracking their impact.
We have also just launched FutureLend our new event for young lenders and bankers. This is a really exciting initiative that I hope will support talented younger professionals in achieving their career goals. There has been much written about the future of roles in banking and their appeal to Gen-Zs; our event should deliver some myth-busting and highlight the rewarding career paths open to professionals in our markets.
I hope you have been able to see – and subscribe to – Horizons, our new ESG publication that launched in March. We already have nearly 5,000 subscribers and I can’t wait to see how Horizons evolves from here. Please do check out Horizons on LinkedIn too – and follow the LMA to catch all our news.
We are in the discovery phase of what is possible around our content and there is no lack of ambition within the LMA team about what we can achieve. As I said last month, I hope you see the change in the way that we are communicating – across content and channels – and that it resonates with you.
As ever, I’m keen to hear from you so that we can ensure we are delivering what you want, not what we think you want. Please continue getting in touch with me at [email protected] with topics for blogs, ideas on what you would like to see more of from us, or anything else you want to share!
We launched a series of small breakfast gatherings in March specifically focussed on Real Estate Finance, hosting some of the main institutional and bank lenders in the sector, including several non-members. The takeaways were very insightful and supported our approach to this sector, particularly in terms of how we collaborate with other trade associations.
In May, we are launching our new Certification Course in the Middle East, based on demand from members in the region. We will also support the LSTA Operations Conference, aligning with the operations and settlement work I mentioned above. On 24 April we will host our Real Estate Finance Conference.
We are also managing our event invitations a little differently with a view to ensuring that we give priority to the most relevant attendees for each event. These priority invitation lists for some events mean that it may take a little extra time before we can confirm places for other applicants, but we will mitigate this with our usual long lead times ahead of events and I am confident that this will not cause inconvenience to members.
All the best.
Scott
