IBOR

The London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) is a series of benchmark interest rates at which banks offer to lend funds to one another in the international interbank market. It reflects how much it costs banks to borrow from one another and is used as the reference rate for around $350 trillion in financial products.

LIBOR fixings are intended to represent the interest rate charged on short-term (unsecured) loans made between banks. Since the financial crisis, the volume of these transactions has dramatically diminished leading regulators to question their transaction-based definition. Historically, LIBOR has been used as a measure of trust within the financial system as it reflects the confidence banks have in each other's financial health. However, the recent manipulation scandal has led many to question the validity of these benchmarks and whether it truly serves the intended purpose. Furthermore, strict regulations, brought in since the GFC, have inadvertently reduced the liquidity within the interbank funding market further compounding the lack of transparency of the reported rates.

In the absence of robust transactional data to base LIBOR consensus on, individual submissions have become a subjective and unclear process requiring "expert" judgment by each contributing bank. Consequently, there has been an observable downwards trend in rate submitters willing to sustain the various benchmarks, due to their sensitivities towards perceived litigation risks.

Following the Wheatley review into LIBOR, the FSB and various other industry bodies have been spearheading collaborative initiatives to strengthen or reform the LIBOR processes.

The transition to new RFRs is fluid and led by the market. In 2013, the FCA recommended the replacement of LIBOR with alternative RFRs. Subsequently, the FSB published its report on interest rate benchmark reform in July 2014 and concluded that an RFR is in many cases are more suitable than a LIBOR which is not supported by sufficient transactional data to make it robust. In July 2017, Andrew Bailey announced that the FCA had reached a voluntary agreement between current panel banks to sustain LIBOR in its current form until the end of 2021. As LIBOR will not be banned post-2021, it is possible that it will continue to be published, but in more recent speeches both ISDA and the FCA have been pushing the industry to migrate away from reliance upon the rate.