Swaps
What are Interest Rate Swaps?
An Interest Rate Swap (IRS) is a financial contract between two parties exchanging or swapping a stream of interest payments for a `notional principal’ amount on multiple occasions during a specified period. Such contracts generally involve exchange of a `fixed to floating’ or `floating to floating’ rates of interest. Accordingly, on each payment date - that occurs during the swap period - cash payments based on fixed/ floating and floating rates, are made by the parties to one another.
How are Interest Rate Swaps traded?
In India interest rate swaps are commonly traded on 2 benchmarks viz MIBOR and MIFOR. Scheduled commercial banks (excluding Regional Rural Banks), primary dealers (PDs) and all-India financial institutions (FIs) are free to undertake IRS as a product for their own balance sheet management or for market making. CCIL has, with effect from 28th March, 2014 commenced CCP clearing for IRS trades referenced to the MIBOR and MIOIS benchmark.
On 3rd August, 2015 CCIL launched an anonymous electronic trading platform for Interest Rate Swaps (IRS) referenced to Overnight MIBOR benchmark known as ASTROID (Anonymous System for Trading in Rupee OTC Interest Rate Derivatives). The system is available for trading from 9.00 am to 5.00 pm from Monday to Friday. The minimum lot size is Rs 5 Crore with a tick size of 0.0025%.