Lombard Risk Management plc, a leading provider of integrated collateral management, regulatory compliance and reporting solutions for the financial services industry, sponsored the 8th annual collateral management forum, organised by Fleming Europe between 15-17th October in Amsterdam, where around 150 collateral business practitioners gathered to discuss key topical issues: regulation and optimisation included. Elaine MacAllan, Head of Functional Development, COLLINE, sat on the Focused Panel Discussion on the 2nd day which was hosted by Chris Hunt, previously Global Head of Counterparty and Market Risk Operations at UBS.  The panel discussed:  Keeping up with higher standards for technology, processes and integrations; Margin optimisation, a function of collateral optimisation; Advanced risk management, activity monitoring and computation of intra-day margins on a real-time basis; and Finding the optimal strategy to comply with different regional legal requirements. Elaine kicked off the panel discussion by highlighting the difficulty many institutions have in sourcing data of good quality. This is becoming increasingly important as we move towards real time single platforms where multiple data feeds are required in order for organisations to have access to an holistic view of their inventory and exposures. Providers also face challenges in developing solutions to meet regulatory issues when the regulators take a long time to finalise the detail, but the deadlines remain the same. Elaine said: “Our team of collateral business matter experts are constantly monitoring the regulatory demands, and we work closely with our clients to incorporate relevant functionality to enable them to meet the regulatory requirements, but new features, however straight-forward, need specifying, developing and thorough testing before we can release them, and our clients also need to carry out testing. We therefore work towards the proposed deadlines, even though we appreciate that these may be delayed.” Helen Nicol, Product Director, COLLINE, demonstrated the latest version of COLLINE (V13), which was released just last week and includes the following functionality: ·         Regulatory Enhancements - supporting clients in meeting their IOSCO and Basel III regulatory commitments. ·         User-definable Optimisation Rule Builder - used to create and combine optimisation rules for flexible scenario analysis and optimum allocation of collateral. ·         Configurable Inventory Manager - providing real-time scenario analysis across financial products and business lines in order to best manage collateral inventory on a firm-wide basis. ·         Enhanced Collateral Substitution Workflow - automating complex, time-consuming manual processes related to substitutions enabling managers to deal with high volumes more efficiently. Finally, a special congratulations to Ms Elena Chaykovskaya, Head of the Financial Market Development Department at Central Bnk of the Russian Federation, who won the prize draw and a bottle of Dom Perignon vintage champagne.