PostTrade 360° Oslo 2023

A status on Norway’s financial market and an update on the strategic ambition to create a common value chain with exchange and CSD combined.

Most would agree that the sweeps of regulatory brushes after the 2008 financial crisis have made the investments universe safer – for investors, as well as systemically. Nevertheless, industry professionals know the flip side, too: compliance is costly, and the pressures have contributed to knock-out competition and industry consolidation across different industry niches along the trade cycle.

15 years later, we have come to recognise many acronyms. UCITS V, MiFID 2, CSDR and SFTR are in place, EMIR is refit, much heavy work around SRD II is done, and so on. Post-trade industry analysts have talked of the focus moving back from regulation, instead more to competition and technical efficiencies. So can market participants and infrastructures safely scale back their regulatory efforts? Which are the operational decisions we still need to make around this in our organisations? What are the efficient ways for some different types of actors to organise their compliance efforts? And are there still big regulatory challenges in the pipe after all?

Military power, democracy, nationalism, religion and ethics … Even a quick glance at the long bibliography of international politics expert Janne Haaland Matlary will reveal her tendency to select the most complex of subjects for her examination. Her awestriking CV proves her seemless take on academia and practice; a professor at the University of Oslo as well as the Command and Staff College of the armed forces, her background includes a position as state secretary of Norway’s foreign office 1997–2000.At PostTrade 360° Oslo 2023, let Janne help us explore the big forces in play around Norway – a unique country with a unique economy, at a unique and critical point in history.

• Optimization, Consolidation and Mobilisation - market participants are actively reviewing their approach to maximize financing opportunities and minimize costs of collateral obligations
• Additional market complexity, regulatory landscape and operational efficiencies
• Tokenization to increase mobility of traditional assets

As the latest development in its ambition to support the primary and secondary markets, Euronext now enables non-Norwegian issuers to list and trade in euros on Oslo Børs.

As over 110 nations are considering Central Bank Digital Currencies, Swift has just concluded a successful sandbox project to enable frictionless global payments by integrating blockchain-based and traditional money money networks. The 18 participants included central banks such as France’s and Germany’s, and commercial banks like BNP Paribas, HSBC, and UBS. Through 12 weeks, 5,000 transactions took place between the Quorum and Corda blockchain networks, and between Corda and a fiat currency.Up next is a second phase of sandbox testing, in which participants can collaborate further and explore new use cases, including in securities settlement (such as cross-asset exchange), trade finance, and conditional payments.