Ed Blount, Executive Director

Center for Study of Financial Market Evolution


 

Ed Blount is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Study of Financial Market Evolution (CSFME), a non-profit research organization with offices in Washington, D.C., and Zurich, Switzerland. The CSFME, formed in 2006, works with practitioners, academics, trade groups and regulators to analyze practices in capital market sectors that have developed too quickly to set formal disclosure and reporting standards.

 

CSFME anonymizes activity and holdings data from market participants, then provides datasets and, as appropriate, financial stipends to academic teams for the development of research papers. Through this process, best practices can be identified to aid self-regulatory improvements to the market system.

 

In 1992, Ed was the first to create a system of peer reviews and securities lending benchmarks for board reporting, called Lending Program Monitor, by forming an institutional research cooperative that grew to include 150 securities lenders, 30 lending agents and 50 borrowers. By 2005, Ed had designed and developed Lending Pit, the first internet-based loan pricing and risk management service with one million daily updates for over 50,000 securities issues.

 

In 2007, Ed sold ASTEC Consulting Group, the securities finance research firm he had founded in 1980, to SunGard Data Systems. At that time, the ASTEC research cooperatives and online risk/pricing systems were serving 500 institutional investors and their agents with counterparty exposures of $3 trillion.  Among these were 350 of the largest U.S. pension funds and 80 of the largest 100 mutual fund families.

 

Since 2006, Ed has been working through the CSFME with the Risk Management Association and Securities Industry Financial Markets Association to create a database of loan activity with which to test the allegations of borrowed proxy abuse posed by certain academic researchers. Over one billion records representng an estimated 90% of all US securities loans from 2005 through 2008 will be included in the final database.

 

Before founding ASTEC, Ed was a U.S. Marine Captain, flying F-4B Phantom fighter jets, then a systems analyst and banker. Early in his career, he was AVP-Operations Head, American Depositary Receipts Department at Citibank, 111 Wall Street. In that capacity, he directed the bank’s ADR business and relationships with securities clearing corporations, depositories and subcustodians in over 100 countries. After Citibank, Ed joined Bankers Trust Company as VP-Head of Securities Product Management at 16 Wall Street. His creation of the BTC securities lending business helped return the bank’s global custody service to profitability, as well as to establish a new generation of interface-driven services.

 

Ed Blount has a BA in Economics from Fordham University, an MBA from Pepperdine University in Los Angeles and an APC from New York University. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences worldwide and was inducted in June, 2009 into the Securities Services Hall of Fame. In September, 2009, Ed was selected by the Securities and Exchange Commission to testify on “Securities Lending and Investor Protection Concerns: Cash Collateral Reinvestment; Default; Lending Agent Compensation and Fee Splits; Proxy Voting”, at its Securities Lending and Short Sale Roundtable in Washington, D.C. He serves on the President's Council of Fordham Universtiy, the Advisory Board of the Mutual Fund Directors' Forum and the Institutional Working Group of Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc.

 

In 2006, Ed Blount co-authored "Managing Liquidity Risks in Cash-based Lending Programs," in Securities Finance: Lending and Repurchase Agreements, edited by Frank Fabozzi and published by Wiley. Then, in April, 2007, he presented his paper, "The Impact of Short Sales and Securities Lending on Capital Market Portfolios: 1990 through 2006," at the IMF-World Bank conference in Moscow, Russia. In September, 2008, his paper on the demise of Bear Stearns was entitled, “Bear Market Posse, or Counterparty Risk Management during the Recent Market Turmoil,” as published in the Risk Management Association (RMA) Journal.. Ed’s 2009 paper, “Liability Dynamics: A New Framework for Counterparty Risk Management?”, appeared in the March issue of the Risk Management Association (RMA) Journal.

 

Ed Blount has been a contributing editor of ABA Banking Journal for nearly 30 years. His published interviews since 2001 include:

 

Christopher Cox, Chairman, Securities & Exchange Commission, October 2008

Alexei Kudrin, Finance Minister, Russian Federation, April 2006

Andrei Kozlov, First Deputy Chairman, Central Bank, Russian Federation, December 2004

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Executive Board, European Central Bank, April 2004

Cynthia Glassman, Commissioner, Securities & Exchange Commission, January 2004

Malcolm Knight, CEO & General Manager, Bank for International Settlements, December 2003

Jamie Caruana, Chairman, Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, September 2003

Michael Alix, Chief Credit Officer, Bear Stearns and Co., December 2002

William Rutledge, EVP, New York Federal Reserve Bank, October 2002

Laurence Meyer, Governor, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, September 2001

Andrew Crockett, General Manager, Bank for International Settlements, August 2001

 

Ed Blount’s articles on Bank Capital Adequacy since 2000 for ABA Banking Journal include:

 

“Risk Capital Management: Basel II, Mortgage Problem Solutions”, October 2008

“Searching for New Paradigms at BIS”, July 2008 

“Basel 1A Heralds Change in Direction”, January 2006

“Coping with Ops Risk Evolution”, April 2005

“Bad Rap on Russian Banking”, December 2004

“Will a Financially-Unified Europe Grap the Lead from the US?”, April 2004

“’B2 Lite’ it’s not,” June 2003

“Can you still ‘Know Your Counterparty’ in the Age of Enron?”, April 2002

“A New Breed of Banker: the ‘risk pillar’ strategist”, June 2001

“Capital Rule Change could dictate Banks’ GLB plans,” November 2000

“Rethinking the Framework: Checked Your Commitments Lately?”, January 2000