Luc Frieden to be Keynote Speaker at Clearstream’s GSF Summit

Luc Frieden, Luxembourg’s minister for Treasury and Budget, will be the keynote speaker at Clearstream’s Annual Global Securities Financing (GSF) Summit which will take place on 21 and 22 January in Luxembourg on the theme “Going Beyond Fragmentation".

Mr Frieden will deliver a speech on “Winning the fight against the crisis” on Thursday, 22 Jan, in the afternoon.

More than 600 specialists from banks, central banks and financial institutions have registered for the 13th GSF Summit which is the world’s largest gathering of fixed income repo dealers, collateral traders, securities lenders and borrowers, treasury managers and money market professionals. This year’s summit will be chaired by Ulf Bacher, Managing Director, ZAN Partners Ltd.

The financial crisis and the subsequent freeze on money markets have shed light on securities financing mechanisms which provide much of the liquidity to the world’s capital market. They involve, among others, the temporary exchange of securities, usually for other securities or for cash of an equivalent value (the collateral) with an obligation to redeliver a like quantity of the same securities at a future date.

Clearstream pioneered the development of collateral management services, including triparty repo, in Europe by launching the world’s first such multi-currency service back in 1993. It now offers a wide range of collateral management services together with a suite of securities lending products under the name of Global Securities Financing (GSF) services. In 2008, GSF services broke the €400 billion mark for monthly average outstandings, illustrating the growing importance of secured financing and the continued flight of collateral towards central liquidity pools at a time of market uncertainty.

Deutsche Börse Group, of which Clearstream is an integral part, also offers secured electronic trading for repo and money markets through its subsidiary Eurex Repo. It is the only platform in Europe to offer all of the advantages of electronic trading in combination with the anonymity of the central counterparty Eurex Clearing AG and Clearstream Banking’s centralized collateral management system.