ICMA Podcast

In this new edition of the podcast series, ICMA Future Leaders (IFL) representatives, Michael Sansen, Charles Tissier and Majoke Hegen speak to Niall Bohan, Director, Asset and Financial Risk Management, Directorate-General for the EU Budget, European Commission. The IFL team discuss with Niall his own career development, progress within the Commission and current role and responsibilities, how ne...

Andy Hill of ICMA speaks to NowCM’s Robert Koller, CEO and Founder and Fredrik Creutz, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder about what has been achieved so far in digitising primary debt markets, its purpose and real-life benefits as well as the end-game of a digital bond market. They also discuss what a digital bond market requires to reach its full potential.

ICMA Future Leaders steering committee members, Michael Sansen, Charles Tissier and Majoke Hegen speak to Bertrand de Mazières, Director General of Finance at the European Investment Bank (EIB) about his career development, including career highlights such as the EIB’s pioneering work in issuing the first ever green bond, while offering his own personal advice to young professionals. Bertrand also...

The ICMA Social Bond Working Group is publishing a series of podcasts focusing on aspects of Social Bonds and their markets. In this episode of the Social Bond podcast, the co-coordinators of the ICMA Social Bond Working Group present recent updates to two documents – the Harmonised Framework for Impact Reporting for Social Bonds  and the Mapping to the SDGs for Green, Social and Sustainability Bo...

ICMA’s Mushtaq Kapasi speaks with Ashwin Jolly, senior dealer at ICICI Bank UK plc, about the Indian bond markets. The conversation covers the different kinds of bonds and issuers in the onshore and offshore markets, key attractions and possible considerations for investors, performance so far in 2022, and the future of sovereign and sustainable issuance.

In the first of a new series on market integrity in sustainable finance, this podcast covers what is good and what is being questioned in the sustainable bond market with a focus on greenwashing risks and remedies. Denise Odaro, Head of Investor Relations, IFC and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Green, Social, Sustainability and Sustainability-Linked Bond Principles leads a lively discussi...

Max Castelli, Co-Chair of ICMA's Asset Management & Investors Council (AMIC) and Robert Parker, ICMA Senior Advisor review the economic and capital markets outlook, its impact on investor portfolios and the implications for the asset management Industry. They discuss issues of particular concern to investors, such as the prospects for growth, inflation and monetary policies, as well as a numbe...

During this ICMA podcast, we sit down with Kristrún Tinna Gunnarsdóttir, Head of Strategy and Sustainability for Íslandsbanki. Íslandsbanki was the first bank in Iceland to establish a Sustainable Financing Framework. Kristrún introduces listeners to the main features of the framework and overall Sustainability approach at Íslandsbanki, and shares her views on potential areas for future focus and...

Nordic representative for ICMA Future Leaders Rebekah Bray speaks with Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, one of the three founders of Female Invest. As business students in 2019, Anna-Sophie and her co-founders saw a clear gap in resources to educate women about how to invest, and decided to tackle the issue head-on by founding Female Invest. Today, the social e-learning platform has paying members across 7...

ICMA Chief Executive Bryan Pascoe, chats to Yanqing Jia from ICMA’s Hong Kong office about how improving diversity and inclusion makes good business sense and the importance of industry leadership by setting a good example. While ICMA has made progress with its D&I initiatives to recruit and support a diverse workforce,  particularly in achieving gender diversity in the group, and in its enthu...

ICMA Chief Executive, Bryan Pascoe introduces the latest  ICMA Quarterly Report   with an overview of market conditions and highlights contributions in the publication from Jérôme Haegli, Swiss Re;  Denis Beau at Banque de France on diversity and inclusion; and Habib Motani from Clifford Chance on 30 years of the GMRA.

ICMA’s Katie Kelly on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the finance industry with specific reference to initiatives in this area at the Banque de France.

In the ICMA Quarterly Report, the Quarterly Assessment is about the transition away from LIBOR to risk-free rates in the bond market. The Quarterly Assessment is introduced in this podcast by ICMA's Paul Richards, Head of Market Practice and Regulatory Policy.

ICMA’s Andy Hill, Secretary, ICMA Secondary Market Practices Committee, updates on the European Commission’s proposal for a revised mandatory buy-in framework and next steps.

ICMA’s, Nicholas Pfaff, Head of Sustainable Finance, summarises in this podcast the key points and recommendations from ICMA’s recent paper on “Ensuring the usability of the EU Taxonomy” also covered in a feature in this edition of the Quarterly Report.

ICMA's Charlotte Bellamy, Secretary to the ICMA Legal & Documentation Committee, provides an update on the current reviews of the Prospectus Regulations in the EU and UK focusing on the key issues for ICMA primary markets members.

ICMA’s Ruari Ewing, Secretary, ICMA Primary Market Practices Committee, talks about ICMA’s response to the FCA’s consultation on a new UK consumer duty, which welcomed the FCA’s intention to exempt both vanilla retail bonds and institutional bonds from the scope of the new duty but raised concerns about the insufficiently narrow calibration of the drafting of these proposed exemptions.

Towards the end of 2021, the European Commission published its proposed amendments to MiFIR as part of the overall CMU package announcements. However, ICMA has suggested modifications to some of the European Commission’s proposals. ICMA's Liz Callaghan, Secretary, ICMA Electronic Trading Council, speaks about these recommendations concern pre- and post-trade transparency as well as the analysis re...

On 1 February 2022, on the day of the go-live of CSDR cash penalties, ICMA’s European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) released its discussion paper, Optimising Settlement Efficiency , aiming to focus attention on key opportunities to strengthen settlement efficiency in Europe. ICMA's Alex Westphal, Secretary to the ERCC, provides some background to the initiative and briefly walks through the k...

ICMA’s Gabriel Callsen, Secretary, ICMA Fintech Advisory Committee, speaks about phase 2 of the Common Domain Model (CDM), which seeks to promote electronification of repo markets, notably open, floating-rate and evergreen repos, and how to become involved in this cross-industry initiative.

Repo expert and author of ICMA’s Guide to Best Practice in European Repo Markets, Richard Comotto, draws on his experience to highlight the challenges faced by frontier markets in trying to build successful new repo markets, including lack of an active interbank money market, illiquid collateral and legal obstacles.

IFL's Alexander Tollast discusses with Jean-Marc Stenger, CEO of FORGE, how innovation and digitalization are changing capital markets, picking out landmark transactions from the past and looking at where we are today and what might change going forward. 

Robert Parker, Senior Adviser to ICMA and ICMA’s Asset Management and Investors Council, reviews the market events of the past weeks, including inflationary pressures, the growing geopolitical tensions and the outlook for growth.

The Green Bond Principles (GBP), Social Bond Principles (SBP), Sustainability Bond Guidelines (SBG), and Sustainability-Linked Bond Principles (SLBP) are the global standard for sustainable bonds. In this podcast, delivered in Mandarin,  ICMA’s Ricco Zhang discusses the Principles, international best market practices and the current onshore and offshore sustainable bond markets in China.

In this episode, IFL’s Sébastien Van Campenhoudt discusses with David Newns, Head of SDX, how securities settlement could be performed by CSDs in a DLT environment, with a specific focus on how the cash leg of the transaction can be processed.