Steven Lord, the London-based director of fixed income derivatives IT at UBS Warburg, has been appointed as the new head of the Interest Rate Derivatives (IRD) working group at FpML.org. The group comprises financial institutions dedicated to seeing Financial products Markup Language (FpML) adopted as the protocol for financial derivatives e-commerce business. Members include Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America.
Lord replaces Guy Gurden, who will continue to contribute to the working group as a representative of SwapsWire.
FpML.org is developing FpML as an e-commerce standard to support over-the-counter (OTC) trading of financial derivatives. It is freely-licensed and based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). The group is led by a board of directors comprising senior derivatives business leaders from major market participants.
Lord is an original voting member of the IRD working group and predicts continued steady progress in the group's efforts to develop FpML version 2.0.
He says: "We have agreed on the FpML version 2.0 document type definition (DTD) and are reviewing the documentation. The working draft is expected to be made public in September."
According to Lord, FpML version 2.0 will extend the FpML 1.0 recommendation. This will add interest rate options and broaden the coverage of swaps. New additions will include swaptions (European, American and Bermudian) caps/floors, cancellable/extendible swaps, FX resetables and early termination clauses.
The FpML.org's Standards Committee implements the strategy set out by the organisation's board of directors. It defines and maintains the FpML standard as well as evolving the standard to cover more products or support additional business services. Its activities are accomplished through working groups.
Working groups focus on FX options, interest rate derivatives, equity derivatives as well as the standard's business messages and architecture.