Collateral has been used for hundreds of years to provide security against the possibility of payment default by the opposing party in a trade. Collateral management began in the 1980s, with Bankers Trust and Salomon Brothers taking collateral against credit exposure. There were no legal standards, and most calculations were performed manually on spreadsheets. Collateralisation of derivatives exposures became widespread in the early 1990s. Standardisation began in 1994 via the first ISDA documentation.In the modern banking industry collateral is mostly used in over the counter (OTC) trades.
However, collateral management has evolved rapidly in the last 15–20 years with increasing use of new technologies, competitive pressures in the institutional finance industry, and heightened counterparty risk from the wide use of derivatives, securitization of asset pools, and leverage. As a result, collateral management is now a very complex process with interrelated functions involving multiple parties. Since 2014, large pensions and sovereign wealth funds, which typically hold high levels of high-quality securities, have been looking into opportunities such as collateral transformation to earn fees.