The Genesis of GPFA

Welcome to another episode of Global Peer Financing Association's or GPFA's Peer Connections podcast. We're excited to share with you today a fireside chat on the genesis of Global Peer Financing Association that occurred in December of 2020, a few months ago during CAIP's virtual forum series. The discussion was led by Charles Quintal and included GPFA founding members, Robert Gooby from Hoop, Dan Kiefer from CalPERS, and Lisa Mantella from Osler. The fireside chat focused on how the Global Peer Financing Association was formed for the benefit of the global beneficial owner members actively engaged in securities financing. We hope you enjoy the discussion. Let's meet our speakers. First, we welcome Robert Gooby, Assistant Vice President, Collateral Management, Fixed Income and Derivatives at the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan. Robert is joined by Dan Kiefer, Investment Manager, California Public Employees Retirement System, CalPERS, and Lisa Mantello, a partner, Banking and Financial Services of Osler Hoskin Harcourt LLP. And moderating today's Fireside Chat is a good friend, Charles Quintal. He's the President and Retirement Committee, Assembly of Quebec Catholic Bishops. Charles, and our honored Fireside Chat guests, the virtual stage is yours. Thank you very much. I'm going to introduce Robert Kuby, who's actually the Chairman and also the founder of the GPFA. So Robert, thanks for joining in today. When we decided to start this association that includes a number of large institutional investors, what was your vision? Before I address that question, maybe I'll just take a couple of seconds to introduce myself. I'm Robert Guby. I work for the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan. I joined HOOP in 2000. The plan was about $12 billion at the time. Today, almost 21 years later, we are at about $101 billion. At Hoop, we employed a liability-driven investing strategy. We employed that strategy back in 2007. So in a lot of ways, we have a lot of bonds and we are a very large user of derivatives in our toolkit. My role at Hoop, my job is really to manage a balance sheet. When I think about managing a balance sheet, we look to optimize balance sheet. And once our balance sheet is optimized, we look to lend that balance sheet out and create an ultra as well. So anyway, just a small background about myself. But in terms of the GPFA and how it was started, and Dan could get a chance to add on to this point, but I've been going to conferences for the last 12 years, beneficial owner conferences, and every year we meet in Florida or California, wherever it is, and we have these sessions where there's custodian banks, there's a lot of market participants, and then there's a small breakout session where the buy side get to speak with each other and try to talk about what's going on and what they see is needed in the industry. And we started building trust with Dan at Calcutta. And among Dan, we just Calcutta, Ohio, Swift. So all these pension plans started getting together. And we started realizing, well, hey, we actually have all the assets on our balance sheet. And the industry is built in such a way that the buy side is forced to go down a certain path. And we said, hey, why don't we take this situation here and we could come together, share network, share knowledge, shape the industry, set new standards, lobby different activities within the industry and figure out a way how we can do peer-to-peer trading and that genesis started back in 2008 for me probably to pass it on to Dan to maybe introduce himself and say his part before we go into more in-depth discussions yeah thank you Rob so I've been with