In the last few years, the projects that I have managed to work on, are really
squiggly in nature. Last Christmas(2020), while the world was celebrating year
end holidays, I was slogging away and writing code that would help a bank
incorporate Risk free rates in to their products. It was exciting to be working
on something where the big boys of the enterprise software were not flexible
enough to support the new requirements. Also many aspects were yet evolving and
hence there was a need to “figure” out what needs to be done, instead of coding
something that was available as a spec. I had to write the spec taking in to
consideration that not everything is black and white, and subsequently implement
the spec. In any case, the project that I worked on, turned out to be a success
and subsequently there have been interesting offshoots to the work that others
have put in place. One of the offshoots is in the “Fallback” world. The basic
idea of “fallback rates” is that the risk free rates are credit adjusted and
made available to market participants, so that they can start changing the
interest rate derivative contracts. The “fallback” as the name suggests creates
a safety net in the contracts, while an active transition plan is put in place.
Stumbled on to a concise writeup by KPMG that talks about all the relevant aspects
of this transition. This blogpost will list down some of the main points
mentioned in the writeup