In a market notice published today, the Australian Financial Markets Association has said it will step away from its function as the Bank Bill Swap administrator.The BBSW is a major short-term benchmark rate in the Australian financial markets, used to provide reference interest rates for the pricing and revaluation of Australian dollar derivatives, business loans and securities such as floating rate bonds.  In practice the job of BBSW administrator requires AFMA to electronically extract live and executable bids and offers from the approved trading venues, calculate the rate and then publish it to the market on a daily basis.AFMA has argued that this task, operational as it might be, depends on advanced IT systems and is increasingly best conducted by specialist data businesses.  "The growing complexity of benchmark administration is illustrated by the Council of Financial Regulators' proposal to move to a volume weighted average price methodology as the primary calculation mechanism, which will require development of a trade repository capability, amongst other things," AFMA said this morning. AFMA said giving up BBSW admin work would allow it to focus on its "more favoured areas", such as policy, advocacy and market development activities.The association said it would begin the process to identify an alternative benchmark administrator over coming months and enable the transfer of BBSW administrator responsibilities to another entity in a reliable manner.   A key condition for change is that the ongoing integrity and reliability of BBSW as a significant benchmark is maintained.  AFMA operates BBSW in accordance with the IOSCO principles for financial benchmarks, which is the global regulatory standard, and would require an alternative administrator to do likewise.