Rule Financial hosted a seminar at the City of London Club last month where leading members of the City’s collateral management community gathered to hear guest speakers compare experiences and enjoy rooftop refreshments on a delightful May evening - just before the last mini-heatwave before this one broke.

Michael Cyrus, Co-Managing Director of Credit and Equity Collateral Financing at RBS gave an insightful presentation on the front office perspective on collateral trading citing five notable trends, while Andrew Grant, Lead Business Architect for Risk Control at UBS, spoke on “Collateral - Risk Mitigation or Reward Generation” delivering the powerful mesage that banks need to change the way they use the collateral with which they’re entrusted.

David Little, Head of Rule Financial’s Securities Finance practice, then introduced the maturity model his team has developed, and explained how it can highlight the challenges a bank would face in in moving its collateral management function from a traditional cost position to a thriving profit centre.

David Field, Rule’s MD, concluded the formal presentation and Q&A session by proposing that a survey be undertaken of just where individual banks and funds believe themselves to be on the collateral management maturity model, by benchmarking various elements of their operations against their peers, an idea taken up with interest by delegates and now in development at Rule.

To download the White Paper and slide presentations of Collateral Management: Beyond the Crunch please click here.