Overhauling the way that financial benchmarks are calculated and governed has been one of the primary impacts of the LIBOR market manipulation scandal. In Canada, the Bank of Canada took over on Monday as administrator of the Canadian Overnight Repo Rate Average (CORRA).
The central bank has begun posting the CORRA — which aims to measure secured overnight rates based on transaction-level repo data — on its website for free.
The bank, which takes over as benchmark administrator from Refinitiv Benchmark Services (UK) Ltd., said that it’s committed to ensuring that CORRA is “a robust, reliable and representative measure” of overnight funding rates.
The central bank will adhere to the latest international standards for benchmarks, which were revised in the wake of the LIBOR scandal to make benchmarks less susceptible to gaming by major financial firms and traders by closely tying benchmark readings to actual transaction data.
“The publication of CORRA by the bank today is an important milestone in the collaborative efforts between the Canadian financial industry and the bank to reform interest rate benchmarks and make financial markets even safer,” said Toni Gravelle, deputy governor at the Bank of Canada.
“We expect that over time CORRA will become the dominant Canadian benchmark used across a wide range of financial products,” Gravelle added.
With the CORRA reform now in effect, the Montreal Exchange (MX) has launched a new three-month futures contract based on the benchmark.
“Developing a robust futures market is an important step in establishing CORRA as a key interest rate benchmark in Canada,” said Harri Vikstedt, senior director of the central bank’s financial markets department. “We look forward to the widespread use of the Montreal Exchange’s new CORRA futures contract.”
CORRA’s new calculation methodology was developed by the Bank of Canada along with guidance from the Canadian Alternative Reference Rate Working Group.
The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), which provides the underlying data used to calculate CORRA, said that it’s “efficiently leveraging the information it collects as the overseer of all investment dealers’ trading activity in debt and equity markets.”
“We are pleased to be a part of such an important milestone in the collaborative efforts to reform interest rate benchmarks by leveraging the data IIROC collects for regulatory purposes,” said Andrew Kriegler, president and CEO of IIROC.