Commentary
Creating ESG Models to Change Negative Views of Financial Markets Good morning, this is Ed Blount and I am speaking to you from the Center for the Study of Financial Market Evolution here in Washington, D.C. I’ve been asked by my good friends at the Risk Management Association, RMA, just up the road in Philadelphia, […]
Databases designed for specific purposes often fail when asked to solve a different problem. As an example, the securities finance databases of leading data providers such as FIS Astec, Datalend, and IHS Markit, designed more than 20 years ago for performance benchmarking, are inadequate when queried for the purpose of the loans themselves. Even regulatory databases enriched with new SFTR filings can only help supervisors monitor leverage based on end-of-day positions, and are unable to determine the propriety of the loans without mapped flow data.
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has taken global financial markets by storm over the last few years. Post-pandemic, the demand for ESG investments has only intensified and has proven to be much more durable than a fad. However, lack of consistency and transparency threatens the trustworthiness of ESG as a category, and has led to accusations of ‘greenwashing.’
January’s GameStop frenzy, where amateur online retail traders took what they hoped would be a rollicking joyride through the world of high finance, has left regulators scratching their heads about what to do next and the retail buccaneers themselves with quite a hangover.
After nearly twenty years of study, the Securities and Exchange Commission seems poised to rewrite the rules on proxy disclosure for mutual funds. Two SEC commissioners predicted within days of each other that there will be radical revisions to how regulated investment companies will report their proxy voting behavior. Both Acting Chair Allison Herren Lee and Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw said in separate speeches last month that the SEC’s current proxy reporting form is not meeting the needs of investors.
Accountability in voting is in the news, and nowhere more so than on Wall Street. Through their U.S. credit policy association and its Asian counterpart, Bankers have responded to suspicion among critics that problems abound in the murkiness of the proxy voting practices of asset managers for large pensions, mutual funds, and other institutional investors. With the launch of the “Global Framework for ESG and Securities Lending (GFESL),” the partnership by the two industry associations aims to provide a shared decision-making framework for managing ESG considerations in securities lending.
Feb 1, 2021: The social controversy over Gamestop’s (GME) battle of wills — r/wallstreetbets v ‘The Shorts’ — may well harden the scrutiny of regulators and litigators toward the US$2.4 trillion global equity finance ecosystem that supports hedge fund strategies. This is a pivotal moment, not only for GME and The Shorts, but also for the clearing systems that their lenders and agents use to secure the funds’ trade settlements and financings.
Ignorance of clearing house rules, coupled with uneven disclosures had clearly inflamed social tensions over the GME short squeeze. These tensions were exacerbated when risk managers at clearing houses were portrayed in the media as fighting the popular uprising of legions of day traders.
Securities lending has proven the most challenging aspect of shadow banking for regulators to bring under a regulatory rubric. One of the most vexing aspects for regulators has to be how to make securities lenders’ decision processes about whether to recall lent securities to vote proxies more transparent to investors and the regulators themselves.
Shadow banking is history, say banking leaders, a thing of the past. New compliance and risk management systems based on the Securities Finance Transaction Regulation (SFTR) and the industry’s evolving Common Domain Model (CDM) will enable financial service providers to regulate their clients’ exposure to counterparties with far more specificity than ever before possible. Originally accepted as a regulatory imposition, bankers are now viewing the SFTR reports of their loan principals as a platform to help state pension funds and others meet their ESG and tax compliance goals with unprecedented precision — along with proof of funding.
Sustainable investing is becoming more important to investors when creating portfolios. As a result, institutions often follow policies with formal environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors to guide their investments. They commit substantial resources to ESG research and produce comprehensive reports about their compliance. But then the same institutions give away their proxy votes when they lend securities for fees to cover their bank charges. And the loans of those securities – and their proxies – go to borrowers with unknown intentions, and often with unknown identities.
One market veteran asked if there is any other space in capitalist finance where the lender knows neither the specifics of the borrower nor the purpose of the loan? Given this opacity, can ESG factors really be squared with securities lending strategies?