Armin Borries, managing director of Clearstream Operations Prague s.r.o., has been re-elected as chair of the Securities Market Practice Group’s (SMPG) steering committee.
Borries was first elected as Europe, Middle East and Africa director in 2007 and has since been part of the SMPG steering committee before being elected in 2018 as chair. As part of his re-election, he will continue to chair the committee for another two years.
SMPG was created in July 1998 and since its launch has established a local presence in more than 30 countries through national market practice groups.
The group is focused on defining market practices for the securities industry based on existing ISO messages for trade initiation/confirmation, settlements, reconciliation and corporate actions.
SMPG’s goal is to provide the community of ISO 15022 and ISO 20022 securities message users with a global market practice on the usage of these messages.
Commenting on what he hopes to achieve for the next two years chairing the group, Borries said: “Regulation has taken over a big chunk of our work in the SMPG – namely the Central Securities Depositories Regulation and Shareholder Rights Directive II will have an effect on the entire community, not only in Europe.”
He continued: “We are working on market practices to be published soon to help the market with proposals on best practice messages that can be used not only over the SWIFT network. Achieving to publish these market practices on time and using this as an opportunity to make our work more visible in the media as well as in social media are my goals for this and the coming year.”
SMPG has produced over 30 market practice recommendations using ISO 15022 messages. SMPG has since expanded to define market practices for the investment funds industry using the ISO 20022 messages.
The group consists of broker/dealers, investment managers, custodian banks, central securities depositories and regulators, and is open to all securities players.
