.jpg)
National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has taken part in the International Financial Congress held in St. Petersburg (Russia). Eddie Astanin, Chairman of the Executive Board, NSD, moderated the roundtable, “Financial Market Infrastructure: From Tradition to Innovation," and summed up the results of the corporate reform.
Roundtable representatives included individuals from the regulator and major market payers. This allowed reform to be considered from different angles: from the perspective of infrastructure (NSD), issuers, the regulator, and registrars.
Roundtable participants agreed that the reform helped increase the awareness and protection of local security holders and also reduced their costs associated with participating in corporate actions. The reform contributed to the standardization of corporate actions via the newly implemented international standards. New services which had previously not been used in Russian practice were introduced, including e-voting and e-proxy voting.
Due to the reform, investors were granted the opportunity to use the depository to resolve the full range of issues associated with asset servicing. Now, the depository is a one stop shop for investors and can help them exercise their rights to securities, regardless of asset location.
Eddie Astanin, Chairman of the Executive Board, NSD, said: “The reform’s goal is to create a live environment to foster an efficient investment process. It is very important to develop a convenient infrastructure to collect and disseminate data as part of corporate actions. Now, our agenda includes two technological tasks: to create a one stop shop for issuers to disclose information, and to build a unified data warehouse – a source of high quality data for the entire market based on our Corporate Information Center (CIC).”
Approximately 100 participants at the roundtable assessed corporate reform results via interactive voting. There was a general consensus that the corporate reform has positively impacted the market and its players.
Eddie Astanin’s statement on the changing role of infrastructure and the business model that has transformed into a marketplace attracted the audience's interest. Based on this model, the Depository will be able to work with retail clients and provide them with a range of transparent and technologically advanced services.
