International Swaps and Derivatives Association

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The International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) is a trade organization of participants in the market for over-the-counter derivatives. It is headquartered in New York, and has created a standardized contract (the ISDA Master Agreement), that two parties sign before they trade derivatives with each other. This Master Agreement is a bilateral agreement. It contains general terms and conditions that apply to all the individual derivative contracts that the two parties may enter into later.

The contract is divided into four sections:

Master Agreement - Contains the bulk of information regulating derivative transactions and credit controls

Schedule to the Master Agreement - Allows for individual counterparties to modify sections the Master Agreement

Credit Support Annex (CSA) - Regulates credit support (collateral) for derivative transactions

Paragraph 13 of CSA - Allows for individual parties/counterparties to modify the CSA

The ISDA Master Agreement is designed to mitigate the credit risk inherent in derivatives by defining different types of credit triggers that indicate a "default" and the consequences of the "default".

The ISDA also creates industry standards for derivatives, and provides legal definitions of terms used in contracts. That this standard setting can have wide consequences, could be seen in a recent controversy over the definition of the 1999 ISDA definition of a "restructuring event". It called into question the idea of such a reference being independent. A restructuring event was triggered in August 2000 when an insurance company restructured about USD 2.8 billion of debt by extending its maturity.

This prompted complaints from protection sellers, who had to compensate (under the 1999 ISDA definition) for an event that was seen as normal in the credit business. There was also a fear of a conflict of interest, since protection buyers had nothing to lose by agreeing to restructuring. (Protection buyers included some of the insurance company's lenders.)

In addition to legal and policy activities, the ISDA manages FpML (Financial products Markup Language), an XML message standard for the OTC Derivatives industry.

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