WASHINGTON - Responding to calls from regulators for increased integrity in thefinancial markets, The Bond Market Association is working with the Institute forFinancial Markets to develop a voluntary program of ethics and integrity training forbond market participants.
TBMA president Micah Green announced the program at the group's annual meeting in NewYork last week.
"Our members are committed to the highest standards of ethical behavior," Green said."We hope these training programs will be of additional help to them, especially indeveloping strategies for handling ambiguous scenarios where the most appropriate courseof action may not be readily apparent."
The group embarked on the initiative as Securities and Exchange Commission chairmanWilliam Donaldson challenged market participants in several public speeches to go beyondtheir legal requirements and incorporate integrity and ethics into their businessdecisions.
Donaldson issued the call both at his swearing-in ceremony at the White House in mid-February and at the Practicing Law Institute's SEC Speaks conference that was held herelater that month. Other regulators and lawmakers have made similar pleas in the wake ofthe collapse of the Enron Corp. and other corporate accounting scandals.
TBMA expects that the development of the initial phase of the program will take six toeight months and that the program will begin operating during the last quarter of theyear.
According to the dealer group, the program, which will be administered by the IFM, willbe specifically tailored to fixed-income professionals and senior management, with thegoal of heightening the awareness of the association's membership to ethical andintegrity issues.
The program will use case-based scenarios presenting real-life situations involvingcustomer and regulatory activities. Participants will be asked to comment on a range ofresponses to each situation.
Dealer compliance officials applauded TBMA's initiative.
The association "is to be commended for its initiative with this ethics and integrityprogram," said Tom Russo, vice chairman and chief legal officer at Lehman Brothers andvice chairman of the IFM. "Many of the difficult ethical issues we face have no rightanswer. As an industry, we need our trade association to take a proactive stance andpromote a dialogue and thinking about integrity issues."
The IFM is a nonprofit, industry-sponsored educational foundation providing informationproducts, education, ethics training, and standard-setting services for all sectors ofthe financial industry.
