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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) were honored at the 2013 Inside Reference Data Awards for mounting the “Best Corporate Actions Data Initiative.” The award recognizes their work on implementing ISO 20022 messages and on DTCC’s multi-year reengineering initiative.
The awards, which were presented in New York May 21, are voted on by financial institution professionals who recognize “industry excellence” in a variety of data areas, including corporate actions and the delivery of corporate actions data.
“We are extremely honored to have our customers and the industry recognize the work we’re doing to automate and streamline corporate actions processing,” said Rob Epstein, DTCC vice president, Asset Services. “As we move forward on our reengineering initiative, we remain committed to implementing an efficient, cost-effective platform for corporate actions processing that benefits all market participants.”
DTCC is the first to generate ISO 20022 messages for corporate actions, which represents a giant step toward standardizing corporate actions data throughout the industry and aligning it with market practice, Epstein said.
SWIFT, a global provider of secure financial messaging services and the ISO 20022 Registration Authority, partnered with DTCC to develop aspects of the ISO messaging. Corporate actions users have the flexibility of using the SWIFT network, as well as DTCC’s SMART Network, to receive and transmit ISO 20022 messages to DTCC.
“SWIFT is delighted to be part of this initiative that will transform U.S. corporate actions processing as well as provide a catalyst within the global market to more fully adopt ISO 20022 for securities transaction processing,” said Malene McMahon, senior business manager, SWIFT.
In the past two years, the DTCC reengineering team with the participation of several clients has:
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- piloted and launched ISO 20022 announcement messages and supported the onboarding of additional users to the ISO 20022 platform.
- begun electronic testing of ISO 20022 messages covering the full entitlement and allocation lifecycle for distribution events.
Another major aspect of DTCC’s reengineering effort is a new browser-based client interface that will be rolled out in phases to all DTCC participants. A mandatory migration to the new interface will take place in 2014 for distributions events. The new interface will ultimately incorporate all event types in one system and will cover the entire corporate actions lifecycle from announcements through instructions to allocations.
DTCC’s reengineering initiative will replace many proprietary systems with the new browser interface and numerous proprietary file transmissions with ISO 20022 messages. DTCC will begin to retire corporate actions proprietary file formats in 2015.
