The Pan Asia 歐美性愛 Lending Association鈥檚 (PASLA) has been steadfast in its journey to integrate the Australian 歐美性愛 Lending Association (ASLA), and therefore expand its coverage to the Australian and New Zealand markets.
In June 2024, the two associations signed a letter of intent to increase its footprint across the Australasia region, and has since welcomed the creation of a Australia and New Zealand Working Group to solve the integration and business needs outlined in the letter.
The two regions are recognised by PASLA as highly developed securities finance markets with a large number of beneficial owners with active lending programmes. Establishing a closer relationship with participants aims to reinforce the association鈥檚 ability to service and represent the securities finance industry across the whole of Asia Pacific.
Strategic vision
It is always about the membership, both the existing and future members. This is about integration and not acquisition, we are delivering on a member led requirement to integrate, to grow, and align resourcing across the Asia Pacific region.
PASLA's defining core is to support investment and market access, then financing of those investments, and the hedging needs of those investments. From index to single stocks, to a vibrant securities borrowing and lending market and a triparty and collateral suite that binds these together.
Like many member-led associations, including PASLA before we professionally staffed, it is challenging to separate franchises from the association and vice-versa. We can provide that critical air-gap, and deliver both independence and breadth of product perspectives, along with market experience, to the dialogue.
The Australian and New Zealand markets are characterised as being highly liquid, open, transparent, and with ease of access for investors, financial institutions of differing scale, and more critically, issuers. Align this with the sophistication from the market participants, the unique market structure of the state-led pension schemes, and you have a backdrop for consistent growth, in markets, volumes, participation, and products.
Member impact
The integration is now fully completed. I am hugely impressed by the foresight and efforts of the ASLA board to engage and embrace this change. It is a testament to how they and the members view the opportunity to integrate alongside PASLA. Special acknowledgement to the efforts of Robert Nichols, Kieran Buckley, Bun Eng, and Andrew Bates, in driving this change with us.
Looking forward, we have raised a market-specific working group that represents the broader membership, led by Bank of America's Steven Newman. The objectives are the same: coalesce member firms around a market structure, look at challenges, look at opportunities, shape alternatives that align with issuers and investors, and then drive the dialogue with all of our stakeholders.
We are incredibly transparent to our members, meetings are managed independently, objectives are member briefed, content is fully documented and distributed across the membership. Any member firm can connect in an anonymised manner into our working groups, we specifically want to separate the franchise from the question, to focus on outcomes that are a net positive for all market participants and to raise those hard to raise questions within a positive construct that anchors firmly to compliance and competition law, which are key challenges for many associations.
I am encouraged by the dialogue we have had this week with the Australian Stock Exchange, a range of our members, and our pipeline of new members locally in Australia.
Pension fund
The Australian state-led pension fund system is by no means unique, however it had the key advantage of being a first mover, compounding its positioning and experience into a market leading client segment, especially now as they asset allocate into different geographies. PASLA is complementary to this 鈥� we have a unique membership structure and home for 鈥榦wners鈥� including sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and state level pension schemes.
Where we stand out is in being a connector for this segment of the market into the broader ecosystem. Again, we operate in a non-franchise specific manner, our dialogue across all our more than 10 working groups is integrated and is centred on the market structure and business outcomes and not one franchise, it is about member connectivity.
In terms of the revenue opportunities for this client segment, this is again about right sizing for the opportunity, broadening where possible product scope and expanding understanding. We facilitate this in all our events, from the headline annual conference, to our one day thematic events, to a panel dialogue or a roundtable event. We bring interesting people to the table to offer insights and pathways to solutions. Part of this is also about expanding connectivity into both regional and global markets.
Industry outlook
The narrative around rate cuts might just end up being fleeting, and the higher for longer will persist. We saw that on 8 July 2025, with the Reserve Bank of Australia keeping benchmark rates at 3.85 per cent.
Challenging for home owners, yes, however it reflects the real challenges of latent inflation in the system along with the current geopolitical and global economic backdrop.
The positives for the industry are that a higher rates environment means that balance sheet, liquidity, and capital continue to be key factors for all market participants and this creates a playfield that means franchises can play to their natural strengths harder still.
Issuers will demand innovative financing solutions, whether in a hybrid, convertible or exchangeable form, these all bring increasing demands and flows into the industry, while releasing hard capital deployed supporting loan books.
Collateral optimisation, capital efficiency, and balance sheet trading alignment are no longer watchwords for business heads and financial controllers. This is fully baked into the pricing quotient for most market participants. Higher rates just emphasises the value that the business can deliver in optimising, being able to scale up (and down) across a range of products.
I am encouraged to see how the industry continues to grow in sophistication and breadth, with new market participants joining every year. Australia and New Zealand are no strangers to this phenomenon and are in many ways leading this.
In summary, it is a super exciting time for the industry, if you can flex your franchise, be adaptive and nimble with the business activity.
In closing
What does success look like? Seeing the industry continue in this growth vector, seeing more of our natural members join us on this journey, both as we right size the association for the membership and driving an aligned agenda centred on market structure adaptations that are a win-win for investors, financial institutions, and issuers.
The more we articulate this, what we are doing and why, the more compelling this is for institutions to join, this may explain our 30 per cent growth in the membership in less than a year, which also reflects the support that our board has given my team to make these changes and implement.
Threading that is not easy, however with the structure of our working groups, the ability to communicate in a non-franchise specific manner, deliver content to and across the industry, and with our stakeholders, mean that we are positioned to support that growth story.
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