Walt Lukken Previews FIA Boca 2026

In what is an annual tradition for this podcast, Futures Industry Association President and CEO Walt Lukken stops by the show to preview what's in store at the annual Global Cleared Markets Conference in Boca Raton, Florida. The agenda in Boca is always packed with fireside chats, speeches and panel discussions featuring some of the most influential leaders in the derivatives industry. Lukken also shares his insights on key issues that are likely to be top-of-mind in the Florida sun, including:

• Prediction markets, digital assets, 24/7 trading and Treasury clearing
• The importance of tokenization and other advancements in improving market efficiency
• What the presence of new regulators in the US means for policy priorities
• The FIA's work and achievements since last year's gathering in Boca

Hoosier Walt!!!: We also had a bit of fun during our conversation. Walt was in South Florida earlier this year to watch Head Coach Curt Cignetti, Heisman Trophy-winner Fernando Mendoza and the rest of the Indiana Hoosiers win the college football national championship. As a proud Hooiser alum, Walt says he might have a few surprises up his sleeve in Boca to help mark IU's iconic achievement. 

Transcript

(Note: This transcript was created using AI. It has not been edited verbatim.)

Sean McMahon  00:06

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Modern Money SmartPod. I'm your host, Sean McMahon, and what can I say? It's March, and you know what that means, road trip! For the fifth year in a row, this podcast is heading to Boca Raton, Florida to bring you insights and interviews from the Futures Industry Association's Global Cleared Markets Conference. Boca is always a fantastic week of incredible speakers, panels and networking events. So joining me right now to give us a sneak peek at what's on tap next week in Boca is FIA President and CEO Walt Lukken, Walt, how are you doing today?

Walt Lukken  00:44

Sean, always great to see you. Whenever I see you, it means Bocas around the corner. So this is perfect. 

Sean McMahon  00:50

Yeah, it's always kind of the Rite of Spring passage. I guess we'll call it these interviews. So yeah, like I just mentioned, you know, we're looking forward to next week, you know, hopefully some sunshine. I actually haven't checked the weather yet, but I was kind of mentally bank on some sunshine down in Florida. But let's talk about what's on the agenda. You know, what are you looking forward to the most next week? 

Walt Lukken  01:08

Well, Boca is really the conference for the capital and risk management markets. So we have 1400 executives coming from around the world to get there. And what we try to do is, as best we can, is to put together an ecosystem that allows the magic to happen, you know, and so that can be partly due to our program. We put on a, you know, two full days of programming that is covering the hot topics of the week and the year, but also we are making sure that the synergies of bringing these folks together, we give people opportunity to talk, discuss, see how they can work together. Oftentimes, mergers are announced at Boca or pairings of different firms. So to me, that's the exciting part. It's hard to predict, you know, we we try to put this together, but there, there could be interesting things that happen that we just don't know about right now. And that's where the magic really begins. 

Sean McMahon  02:17

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I've in terms of interesting things happening. I've been to Boca. I think this is about my 12th or 13th year, and it just seemed like every, every year, something happens in the wider economy that kind of, you know, leads the conversations in Boca, you know, whether it's, I think there was, you know, the disaster in Japan with the tsunami in the nuclear meltdown years ago, and then, and then the collapse of, you know, Silicon Valley Bank and all kinds of interesting things that then, you know, like I said, kind of top the agenda in Boca, and we hear from some of the best minds there. So, So, getting back to the agenda, like I mentioned, there's a lot of, you know, speakers and panels, you know, you know, chairman of the CFTC, the SEC, what are you looking forward to the most?

Walt Lukken  02:59

Yeah, and you mentioned, there's always something that we're not expecting at Boca to happen, and this year, it's the invasion of Iran, and that's going to be coloring, I think, everything that is discussed and how the geopolitics are going to affect the capital markets and the risk markets moving forward. So you know, this week, as we lead into Boca, is a volatile time in the markets, and people in our markets are doing what they're meant to do, which is help people manage their exposures around the world. So that's that's going to be, I think, coloring the week a bit, you know. But for me, you know, as you mentioned, we have the chair of the CFTC, the chair of the SEC. There's a lot going on between those agencies to try to bring clarity to the crypto community, to the prediction markets. We have, you know, the exchange leaders, which traditionally has been the top you know capital market exchanges and and risk exchanges around the world, but we this year, shook it up a bit, and we're going to put some of the new markets, some of the prediction markets, some of the crypto exchange CEOs on that exchange leaders panel. And so we have two days of that, both on Tuesday and Wednesday, part one and part two of that. And that looks to be incredibly exciting as well. But then we also have some interesting speakers beyond that. Joe Lubin, who is the CEO of consensus, one of the founders of Ethereum, is going to be speaking. We have Chuck Todd to give us sort of the political take on what's happening in Washington right now. Jane Coplin is speaking from Polymarket. There's a lot of news coming out of the prediction market community, and we have Serena Williams, which I'm really excited about. She's got a new fund that she's launching, and you're hearing a lot about sports betting and investments and how those things are converging. So it'll be fascinating to hear. From Serena as part of our speaker set at poker next week. Yeah, it seems like

Sean McMahon  05:04

Serena is the perfect speaker there. Because, as you mentioned, you know, there seems to be kind of a coming together of sports markets and prediction markets, you know, with more with more traditional exchanges and more established players. So how do you see that all shaken out? You can't even open, you know, your newsletter, your inbox, your FIA SmartBrief, without seeing headlines about stuff like prediction markets. So, you know, the FAA is kind of at the center of all that and how that evolves. So what do you see for that going forward?

Walt Lukken  05:33

Well, these are young, dynamic markets. Clearly, there's demand for that with with people, you know, I, I have been a student of prediction markets since my time at the CFTC. I was chairman of the CFTC when the Iowa prediction markets were, you know, operating on low dollar stake. You know, political contracts. And they, they are within the jurisdiction, the exclusive jurisdiction of the CFTC. We exempted them out of our jurisdiction because we didn't feel the CFTC regulatory structure really fit those low dollar markets. And then I asked for, you know, to do a request for information around those markets, to hopefully do a rulemaking to give clarity. That didn't happen. The financial crisis happened and and overtook the last couple years of my administration. But since then, you know, these markets have matured developed, and people have really seen the value of them. But I think there, we've come to a time that we need clarity. And I'm glad that the chair of the CFTC, Mike Selig, has indicated that he's going to do some rule making in this area, and hopefully bring some clarity about how these markets work. What's permissible, what are the boundaries of these markets? He may not go as far as deciding whether sports betting is in or out. That's being battled out in the courts right now, and probably is a call for Congress to make, but there is a lot of wood chopping that needs to get done for these markets that can bring clarity to it and allow these interesting markets to function in good standing going forward. So I'm excited to hear more about that.

Sean McMahon  07:20

Okay, and then, in addition to prediction markets, 24/7 trading, it's been a hot topic at Boca a couple of years, but it seems like it might be on the agenda again this year. So, so what do you see with regard to that issue?

Walt Lukken  07:33

Yeah, and FIA has identified this as one of its strategic priorities, because it covers a lot of things for us. You know, we came out with a paper last summer around tokenization, because we see there's great promise in that technology to help move collateral and value around the markets quicker, faster without, you know, without any limitations. But there needs to be some work done. And so as FIA, you know, we're a great convener of our industry. We can bring the great minds together and and start to work through these problems. The same for 24/7 so we're, FIA is going to be coming out with a thought piece before Boca that lays out the issues that need to be addressed. And hopefully that is the opening salvo of the work that needs to be done, and that includes making sure, not only that trading happens, but clearing happens, that the risk management of those trades can work on a real time basis. 24/7, so that is incredibly important operational issues, tokenization, if we can advance tokenization and the public payment rails, we can actually solve for a lot of this. So that's exciting. And then there's also going to be regulatory issues that have to get resolved. So we're trying to lay out the case for how the industry moves forward on 24/7 it's going to happen. We just want it to happen in a way that's measured and safeguards customers and the marketplace. So you know, a lot of talk, as you mentioned on 24/7 next week, including we'll have a round table at Boca on Tuesday afternoon talking through those issues.

Sean McMahon  09:18

That's great. So you know, you've done an excellent job of laying out, you know, the crucial role that the FIA plays in, kind of bringing these, these folks together for conversations about the evolution of markets, you know, for things like 24/7 trading and prediction markets. But it seems like Boca is also a time of the year where you kind of take inventory of other stuff that the FIA has been involved in. You know, that stuff's all kind of headline grabbing, but there's also some stuff behind the scenes that you and your team are working on. Are working on, you know, the other 11 months of the year, besides March. So what are some of the big accomplishments since we got together last time in Boca in 2025?

Walt Lukken  09:52

Well, I mean, we are a global trade association, which is a bit unique. Most trade trade associations are, you know, based in. Certain jurisdictions around the world. So we have uniquely represent the interest of our industry, whether we're in the Americas, whether we're in Europe or whether we're in Asia. So in the United States, there has been a lot of work done on trying to simplify the rule set around our community to give relief to our community. And so there has been some important things done there. For example, you know, one thing the CFTC provided the industry last year is making sure that how we interact cross border isn't double collateralized. Right now they would have to put up, you know, collateral for a trade and and then post it again at their foreign entity that was recognized as duplicative and will save the industry $8 billion so that was a huge win for us, you know, trying to, trying to move that forward. You know, in Europe, we've been working a lot on EMIR 3.0 that's the provision that has to show certain amount of clearing happening on continental Europe, and we've been implementing that with our members, and feel like we've made some really strong progress there. In Korea, they were trying to do night trading without really allowing for risk management around the night trading. And so we have worked hard with our members to try to minimize that and to kill that proposal, and that was done this year as well. So a lot of a lot of interesting things is, as I already mentioned, the tokenization paper we're working on with a lot of our members to figure out how we advance that. You know, we we invented a new clearing model in Europe called the EU Agency Trust, which now mimics the US or agency clearing model that will help bring it capital efficiencies to a variety of our clearing members. So there's a lot of things, you know, Basel capital, I can't go into all these things, but it's, it is been a incredibly busy year, and it's wonderful that these small things add up after a while, because what we want to do is create a system that's safe but also gives capacity to our industry to grow. So I think last year's work has given us a good foundation that as these new challenges come in, growth opportunities come in, like Treasury clearing is certainly one that we worked on a lot last year, we can start to take on that business in a safe manner and have the capacity to do it. So to me, last year's work was very exciting.

Sean McMahon  12:42

Yeah, it sounds like you're definitely very, very busy in the past year. So any new priorities that you're going to be focusing on in the year ahead, you know, aside from the things we discussed already today,

Walt Lukken  12:53

Well, we will continue in Europe. The other has been an effort to try to find ways to simplify rules in Europe, and so we're working very hard with the European Commission to find ways that we can, you know, simplify the rules and make Europe a more attractive place for investment, so that we see great promise there. And our hope is that we can make some advancements in that regulatory simplification, as I mentioned already, prediction markets are going to take a lot of our time in the US, and that is digital asset legislation. So our hope, and we have been advocating for passage of the digital asset market structure bill in the US, the clarity bill. But once that gets put into place, there'll be a lot of work to be done by the CFTC to implement those rules and the SEC. So we're going to stay active on trying to grow that market, you know. And then in Asia, we always continue to work. And I'm on a advisory board in China to make sure that the Chinese markets are open and also that we're learning from each other. You know, we do things that I think China can benefit from, but China does some interesting things that our markets can learn from. So you're trying to keep that dialog open, I think is important for us, and we'll continue that work in 2026. 

Sean McMahon  14:17

Well, it certainly sounds like it was a busy 2025 and the next year is going to be just as busy. So best of luck with all the continued hard work for you and your team. And you know, before I let you go, I will say, you know, those who follow you on LinkedIn know that poke is not going to be your first trip to Florida this year. I seem to recall seeing photos of you down in Miami in January, cheering on Head Coach Curt Cignetti and Heisman Trophy-winner Fernando Mendoza as the as your beloved Indiana Hoosiers won the national title. So how was that experience for you?

Walt Lukken  14:51

You know, it's it's hard to describe the joy that it brought, not only me, but also the. 800,000 alumni of Indiana University, because we've not had the pleasure of experiencing anything close to that. And so I think, I think because, you know, a, it's never happened and B, there's no promise it will happen again. Like literally, all 800,000 people were traveling around the country, following this really interesting story and a team that many could root for and felt good about. And so I was had the pleasure and fortune of being able to go with my youngest son to the game, and it was a ton of fun, and I'm still smiling from it, My cheeks hurt, you know, three months in, you know, from from all that, from all the, all the joy that it's brought us. And I will say, just as a little teaser, there may be some of that Indiana joy coming to Boca so. So anyways, we're excited about, you know, what's going to happen next year, but it truly was a blessed experience for all us Hoosiers out there.

Sean McMahon  16:05

Well, now you've definitely piqued my interest in terms of what kind of Hoosier gear you might be rocking in Boca or whatever, whatever else you have, you know, planned up your sleeves. So it'll be fun. Yeah, you can count on that. So hey, listen, Walt, I always appreciate catching up with you, and you know best of luck and safe travels, and I'll see you next week in Boca.

Walt Lukken  16:25

Thank you, Sean and I did look at the forecast. It's 80 and sunny all three days, so can't wait.

Sean McMahon  16:32

Fantastic. I can't wait to get there. 

Well, that's all for now, but like I said earlier, we're excited to be bringing you exclusive coverage from the sidelines of the FIA global cleared markets conference. We'll be posting multiple episodes per day featuring insights from some of the biggest names in the industry. So if you like this podcast, please share it with your friends and colleagues and follow us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're in Boca, you'll probably see us recording, so stop on by and say hello. The Modern Money SmartPod is a production of SmartBrief, a Future company.