Message from the CEO

Bryan Pascoe

Chief Executive Officer of ICMA

Dear ICMA members,

As we approach the end of 2025, I am pleased to share with you some insights into many of the initiatives undertaken by ICMA over the course of the year to support and advance the integrity, resilience and connectivity of global capital markets.

Policy engagement — including EU Savings & Investment Union

On the regulatory front, ICMA maintained active engagement in major public policy debates across all relevant jurisdictions. We have provided consistent input into the ongoing dialogue around the proposed EU Savings and Investment Union (SIU), which will drive fundamental reform throughout Europe, emphasising the importance of proportionate, disclosure-based regimes that support — rather than fragment — capital market integration. Extensive engagement took place with members via the various technical committees and working groups, which will pick up pace in 2026 with the recently published EU Market Integration and Supervision Package.

At the same time, our advocacy work with European and global regulators addressed non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI), prudential regulation, post-trade transparency, and settlement-discipline reforms under CSDR, including our continuous push to promote market-led settlement efficiency initiatives. The Bank of England discussion paper on Gilt repo market resilience has paid particular attention to central clearing and minimum haircuts as tools to boost market resilience and we expect this to be an ongoing theme heading into next year and beyond, given market structure change. Our aim continues to be more proportionate and relevant regulation that preserves market liquidity, supports cross-border activity, and avoids unintended constraints on financing flows.

Delivering on market-practice, post-trade and infrastructure reform

On the primary side, ICMA held a major event at our Brussels premises on the Eurobond market, jointly delivered with the two ICSD members, to reinforce the message of the effectiveness and success of the Eurobond framework as a scalable, cross jurisdictional framework for broadly distributed debt issuance. Tailored Eurobond presentations were delivered to ESMA, in Hong Kong, and will continue in 2026 to IOSCO, some local markets and in the MENAT region.

This year the work of our Secondary Market Practices Committee (SMPC) and related working groups remained central to supporting bond market liquidity and efficiency. In July we published our semi-annual report covering EU and UK sovereign bond trading activity, providing extensive data and analytics. In related developments, ICMA was instrumental in providing detailed data analysis to the EU and UK regulators to help guide the calibration of the revised bond market deferral regimes, which are now in the process of being rolled out in anticipation of consolidated tapes for bonds to go live in both jurisdictions before the end of Q2 2026.

The shortening of settlement cycles in Europe (“T+1”) creates numerous challenges that will have a global impact, and ICMA continues to play a leading role in ensuring the successful implementation for bond markets, including the additional complexities this creates for securities financing. On repo and collateral markets, the European Repo and Collateral Council (ERCC) updated its Guide to Best Practice in the European Repo Market and published a 2025 white paper on repo “haircuts”, seeking clarity and consistency in valuation and risk parameters across jurisdictions.

In parallel, ICMA updated its legal opinions on the Global Master Repurchase Agreement (GMRA) for several jurisdictions, including a new opinion for Saudi Arabia — thereby maintaining a globally recognised standard for cross-border repo contracts.

Advancing FinTech, digitalisation and data interoperability

Digital transformation remained a strategic priority. The Bond Data Taxonomy, first published in 2023, has seen a significant momentum in adoption this year. Notably, the first digital green bonds issued by the HKSAR government cited BDT for issuance data, and major post-trade infrastructures announced alignment of their “Issuance & Processing Taxonomy” with BDT.

This work is complemented by our increasing involvement in standardisation efforts such as the FINOS Common Domain Model (CDM) — helping firms to achieve end-to-end automation across bond, repo, securities-lending and derivatives lifecycles, thereby reducing operational risk and easing cross-jurisdictional complexity.

Moreover, ICMA took the lead in the global initiative Project Guardian — specifically its Fixed Income workstream — aiming to promote tokenised/digital bond markets in collaboration with the Monetary Authority of Singapore and a broad array of official and private sector stakeholders.

Sustainable finance — enhanced guidance and new thematic focus

Sustainable finance remained firmly at the heart of our agenda despite politically generated challenges and headwinds. In November, we published the Climate Transition Bond Guidelines (CTBG) that introduce a standalone label for transition-themed use-of-proceeds bonds financing projects that complement and typically go beyond the scope of the Green Bond Principles (GBP) in addressing today’s decarbonisation and emissions reduction challenge. The release of these Guidelines represents a significant breakthrough after years of market discussion on the potential need for this new label.

We also released earlier in June a new thematic resource, the Practitioner’s Guide on Sustainable Bonds for Nature, designed to support labelled bonds directed at biodiversity and nature-positive outcomes.

These publications illustrate our broader work with the Principles to encourage credible issuance, impact reporting and robust use-of-proceeds standards globally. The continuing relevance of this work is evident: despite uncertain macroeconomic and policy conditions, demand for sustainable bonds remains resilient, underlining the vital role of transparent, high-integrity standards in underpinning market confidence.

Capacity building, global outreach and regional committee strengthening

2025 saw a notable expansion of ICMA’s capacity building and regional outreach. Unquestionably our work has emphasised how technical assistance and training support institutional and human-capital development in emerging and frontier economies — across Africa, Asia and the MENAT region. Examples include targeted workshops in partnership with key official institutions on repo markets, sustainable finance, and market infrastructure development.

To support and guide this work, we further strengthened our regional governance — appointing new leadership in key regions such as MENAT and Southern Africa (in addition to several European jurisdictions). This provided new perspectives and energy in our regional structure to facilitate more consistent and relevant engagement, demonstrating ICMA’s commitment to supporting growing financial markets across those regions and our ambition to ensure our global agenda is shaped by diverse viewpoints.

We also inaugurated a new regional committee for the UK & Americas — to round-out and strengthen our global committee structure and ensure full global coherence of our standards.

Education and professional standards — building for the future

Against a fast-changing backdrop in the space we have intensified and broadened our efforts in education and training, which dovetails very neatly with the more fundamental work we are undertaking in market capacity-building highlighted earlier. In 2025 we launched ICMA Certified — a new standard in professional capital markets qualifications — to ensure that market participants worldwide have access to high-quality, up-to-date training in areas ranging from traditional bond issuance to digital markets, repo, and sustainable finance. We have also continued to explore new delivery channels as well as refreshed course content to maintain our leading position in professional training, with market digitalisation playing an important role in this.

Looking ahead — retaining vigilance and focusing on coherence

As we look forward to 2026, we can take confidence from the impressive resilience debt markets have demonstrated throughout this year. Nevertheless, the environment remains one of complexity and uncertainty; volatile geopolitics, sovereign-debt dynamics, continued interest-rate and liquidity challenges, ever-increasing issuance volumes across rates and credit, evolving regulation for non-bank financial intermediation, and accelerating technological change. Against this backdrop, ICMA’s purpose is more essential than ever. With constant market change we will need to focus on building out our buy-side proposition and engagement with a special focus on alternative liquidity providers in fixed income, private credit, active fixed income ETFs and other topics.

We will continue to push for regulatory outcomes that support our core objective of well-functioning efficient capital markets by promoting common standards that foster digitalisation and interoperability, deepening sustainable-finance frameworks that can credibly deliver environmental and social impact and expanding capacity building so that capital markets’ benefits are more realisable and have genuine impactful.

All of this depends on the active engagement and expertise of our membership. As we approach year end we have 637 members across 71 jurisdictions, a high watermark for our Association, with everyone helping us deliver on that core objective. Thank you for your input, commitment and readiness to collaborate. I look forward to working together in 2026, as we endeavour to strengthen international capital markets for the benefit of all market participants and the broader global economy.

Best regards

Bryan Pascoe
Chief Executive Officer
International Capital Market Association (ICMA)

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