The Global Peer Financing Association (GPFA) has welcomed the State Board of Administration of Florida as its 11th member, swelling the combined lendable assets of all buy-side members from less than $1 trillion to more than $6 trillion over six months.
The Florida Retirement System Pension Plan is the fifth largest public pension plan in the US, providing retirement benefits for more than 900,000 current and former public employees, with approximately $2 of every $3 paid from investment earnings.
Since launching in July 2020 with four US pension funds, the association has gained additional members across several continents and now represents more than 5 million people that are pensioners or public sector workers.
The Florida asset manager is the first beneficial owner to join this year and follows Norges Bank Investment Management and several others that signed up in late 2020.
The trade body is now setting its sights on leveraging its large market footprint to bring positive change for the underlying pensioners that contribute to the various schemes.
Commenting on GPFA’s growth while hosting the trade body’s Peer Connections podcast (available on the SFT multimedia hub), eSecLending’s Peter Bassler states: “What’s really powerful about this organisation is that you’re representing end beneficiaries, and pensioners. Most organisations are representing banks or brokers and this is the first of its kind that focuses on end beneficiaries.
“When you put together all the members this really is grassroots and in the interests of individual people.”
The episode focused on the association’s targets for 2021 and fellow podcast speaker and GPFA chair Robert Goobie described how that the next phase of growth will involve fostering a greater sense of community among new members.
The aim, Goobie says, is to form several working groups that will allow members to share information on all aspects of their securities financing programmes and find opportunities to collaborate on solutions to common challenges.
“One of the main goals of the organisation is to enhance peer-to-peer trading but in order to do that you need to think about the activities that support peer-to-peer trading,” Goobie explains.
These groups will assess a wide range of topics including how members approach their triparty repo activity through the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, as well as issues around legal, credit and new technologies, he added.
Goobie, who also serves as assistant vice president collateral management, fixed income and derivatives at HOOPP, also highlighted environmental, social and governance as a key topic of interest for the association’s members and outlined ambitions for collaborating on setting standards and creating principles that might advance the adoption of sustainable financial practices across the global market.
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