Connecting to the New OTC Derivatives Community's Markets, CCPs, Platforms, and Infrastructure

In an effort to maximize their individual liquidity, OTC derivatives markets, CCPs, and platforms are increasingly making it more about their products and services and less about how to connect to them by moving toward more open interfaces, infrastructure, messaging standards, access methods, and even points of presence (POPs) in third-party data centers. The new electronic infrastructure being built has tended to concentrate in those third-party data centers rather than on-premises of individual players, easing the formation of these new connectivity webs.

While the letter G in G-20 denotes the word "global," the implementation of efforts of G-20 reforms have been anything but consistent or synchronous and are turning the letter G in global OTC derivatives markets into the letter R for regional. With each additional regulatory variation and latency across G-20 member countries' regulatory efforts, the new regionalized OTC derivatives environment gets more and more complex relative to pre-2008 global markets. The associated infrastructure and connectivity to support is growing by orders of magnitude and greatly increasing the costs of doing business in a regulatory compliant manner.