RBA Assistant Governor Guy Debelle spoke at a Bloomberg conference in Sydney yesterday on what he conceded was the "arcane" topic of benchmarks - specifically FX and interest rates. There wasn't a great deal that was new in Debelle's comments. As Sean Keane of Triple T Consulting, writing a client note for Credit Suisse Singapore Branch, observed, "there was certainly nothing that was unfamiliar to anyone who has followed the gradual changes that have been rolled out over the past six years."  Keane wrote that the Financial Stability Board's recommendations regarding the FX benchmarks appear to have had some success, with sell side market participants moving to segregate client fixing orders, often via the use of electronic algorithms rather than relying of spot voice trader execution. This has reduced the incentive to manipulate prices. In his speech, Debelle noted how "the odd $10 billion fine focuses the minds of senior management around fixing transactions."  Also, some smaller banks have charged clients for providing this fixing service, including via the pursuit of a "rent my algo" strategy. This was also recommended by the FSB. The Markets Committee of the Bank for International Settlements is meeting soon and will be working with the 15 largest FX markets in the work to come up with a code of conduct by May 2017. The further discussion around interest rate fixings was largely focused on the Australian market, and on the methodology used to determine the BBSW fixing that is Australia's LIBOR equivalent in terms of its use as a financial market mechanism.  Debelle noted that the Australian Council of Financial Regulators recently issued a consultation paper on potential reform of the BBSW fixing. One of the concerns raised by the CFR in reviewing the Australian rate fixing mechanism was that the BBSW fixing is based upon the midpoint of the best bid and offer rates shown for Prime Bank paper, but that trading of that paper has diminished in recent years.  The CFR report noted that on some days there was no turnover at all during the rate set period. The report said turnover at the rate set had fallen from around A$500 million per day at the end of 2013 to a number closer to $225 million today. The number of days on which no trading takes place has risen from approximately one in ten to a number that is closer to one in three today. Another option for reform would be to move to a mechanism closer to the new LIBOR standard, in which banks submit rates reflecting their "assessment of their aggregate cost of wholesale funding, based on their transactions in a particular window."  Keane suggested a further alternative, requiring the banks to "submit all of their transactional data, and have the fixing administrator calculate the average fixing rate for them." Such comprehensive and unfiltered downloads of funding data are generally not favoured by the banks," Keane observed in regard to Debelle's commentary.