ISDA's 40th AGM: Key Takeaways & Insights

In late April, our CEO and Founder Laurent-Olivier Labeis (Leo), together with our Head of Client Services, Lionel Smith-Gordon, jetted Stateside for the 40th edition of the ISDA AGM in Boston, Massachusetts.

Running since 1985, the AGM has consistently brought together industry leaders and decision makers from across the globe to learn about and debate the issues that matter to the derivatives market. This year was no different, and the REGnosys team was proud to be silver sponsors for the flagship event.

Across the pre-AGM symposium and main conference, discussions ranged from the advancement of ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) and the Common Domain Model (CDM), to the growing role of digital assets, tokenisation, and AI in financial markets.

The event showed how quickly the industry conversation is shifting from debating digitisation to scaling it in practice.

DRR adoption gathers momentum

The opening day featured the “Advancing the ISDA DRR and CDM Implementation” panel, where Leo joined the discussion on the progress of DRR adoption.

Leo began by setting the historical context. DRR has been an industry ambition for around a decade, but became a reality in 2021. Production adoption then accelerated through the wave of regulatory rewrites, beginning with the CFTC Rewrite in November 2022.

Today, DRR covers eight regulatory regimes, with MiFID and SFTR coming next. This puts DRR on a path towards coverage of close to 100% of the trade reporting flows firms are subject to.

Adoption is also accelerating. In the past year alone, five additional firms have gone into production, with the most recent and new adopters discussed at the event including LSEG and Natixis. As Leo put it during the panel:

 “FOMO is playing out.”

“No one wants to be left behind” as more firms move from experimentation into production adoption. One of the strongest signals from the AGM was that DRR is no longer a theoretical industry initiative and is now being adopted in production, integrated into market infrastructure and increasingly viewed as a practical route to more accurate, efficient and scalable regulatory reporting.

CDM as the foundation

When asked what he views as the biggest challenge facing DRR, Leo made clear that it was data migration into CDM, which REGnosys has developed solutions for.

Initial scepticism around DRR focused on whether reporting rules could really be standardised across firms, but in practice the more significant challenge lies one layer down in getting each firm’s internal data into a shared model.

This point was echoed by Emmanuel Geinoz of Pictet, who described implementation in similar terms. Getting data into CDM is the challenge; once that is done, DRR becomes straightforward.

In other words, DRR is the visible output, but CDM is the foundation that enables firms to align data, reduce interpretation risk and scale reporting across regimes.

As Leo reflected following the AGM, “the question is no longer whether reporting rules can be standardised, but how quickly the market can move towards shared data models such as the Common Domain Model.”

Tackling fragmentation in reporting

The panel also explored the problems that DRR and CDM are designed to address. Today, regulatory reporting remains fragmented across jurisdictions, across firms and often within firms themselves, as the same rule can be interpreted differently by different market participants. These inconsistencies create reconciliation breaks, increase operational risk and reduce data quality.

The discussion highlighted just how difficult the current model is to scale. Manually absorbing rule changes, mapping requirements across jurisdictions and resolving breaks after submission is costly and inefficient.

By expressing reporting logic in a common, transparent and machine-executable format, and grounding it in a shared data model through DRR and CDM, firms can reduce ambiguity and improve consistency before reports are submitted.

There was also an important discussion on validation. Rather than relying on trade repository validation as the primary control, firms can use DRR rules earlier in the reporting workflow to identify and resolve issues before submission.

More structurally, some regulators and trade repositories are now looking at publishing their own rules directly into DRR. This could mark a significant shift from DRR being an industry interpretation layer to a regulatory primary source.

AI, digital assets and interoperability

AI was another major theme across the AGM, with ISDA CEO Scott O’Malia highlighting DRR as one of ISDA’s flagship mutualised digital solutions and showcasing how AI applies to the DRR coding process.

His key message was that AI becomes more powerful when built on top of standards, rather than replacing them. This was reinforced across wider discussions on AI, where data quality, lineage and governance were repeatedly identified as vital success factors.

Discussions also explored how AI is being applied operationally, including the conversion of rule changes into DRR code, improving traceability of decision-making and accelerating model extension.

Digital assets and tokenisation were also central themes during the conference. Stablecoins are increasingly being deployed as payment and collateral instruments, while tokenisation is being explored in the context of liquidity, balance sheet optimisation, real-time collateral and 24/7 operating markets.

Interoperability appeared again as the same foundational issue, as blockchain alone does not solve market structure challenges. In order to scale, tokenised markets will require common definitions, clear asset lineage, standardised eligibility rules and consistent data.

Again, the CDM featured prominently as the standards layer that can support this interoperability.

Looking ahead

The AGM closed with clear calls to action. Firms were encouraged to look at how their counterparties are reporting today, pick a product, pick an event, and try DRR for themselves.

The 40th ISDA AGM showed an industry approaching a crossroads. Digital assets, AI, collateral optimisation, and regulatory modernisation are all moving from discussion to implementation.

Across each of these themes, the same conclusion emerged that the future of financial markets depends on standardised, high-quality and traceable data. For REGnosys, it was encouraging to see DRR and CDM at the heart of that conversation.

A big thank you to ISDA and all speakers for a productive and insightful few days in Boston.

At REGnosys, we’re proud to support industry collaboration and innovation in regulatory reporting. As CDM and DRR continue to address some of the industry’s biggest challenges, our commitment remains steadfast in delivering the compliance gold standard and driving efficiency through our software platform Rosetta.