Date: Friday 17 October 2025
Overview
ICMA and Swiss Re hosted an exclusive high-level breakfast roundtable that brought together senior policymakers, market practitioners, and institutional investors to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the global financial system: market fragmentation.
Global capital markets are facing accelerating fragmentation, shaped by geopolitical realignment, diverging regulatory regimes, complex infrastructure, and emerging currency blocs. These fractures threaten growth, increase inflationary pressures, reduce liquidity, and hinder optimal capital allocation. Importantly, this long-term shift also poses fundamental implications for how insurance risks are priced, transferred, and absorbed.
Featuring insights from IOSCO, this roundtable explored the economic and systemic implications of fragmentation and identify actionable strategies to maintain market connectivity and consistency. Discussions drew on the respective expertise of ICMA and Swiss Re in debt capital markets and re/insurance to address how to preserve cross-border capital flows and risk-sharing mechanisms by deliberating:
- How global and regional actors can preserve the confidence and connectivity needed for capital to flow efficiently and risks to be shared widely across borders;
- The importance of standardisation in debt markets and infrastructure financing facilitate and unlock long-term capital from institutional investors; and
- Resilience-building through insurance-linked investment strategies and catastrophe bonds
By engaging on issues and setting forth recommendations and actions, the roundtable aimed to contribute to reducing risk and advancing cross-border financing, narrowing insurance protection gaps and safeguarding the resilience of the global financial architecture.
Tuesday 21 May
| CEST | ||
| 09:30 | Arrival registration, meet and greet | |
| 10:00 | Welcome remarks | |
| 10:15 | Keynote address | |
| 10:35 | Keynote address | |
| 10:35 | Keynote Address | |
| 11:15 | Panel session: Improving and growing capital markets | |
| 12:15 | Lunch break & networking session | |
| 13:15 | Welcome address | |
| 13:30 | Panel session: Shortening of the settlement Cycle | |
| 14:30 | End of conference |
