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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced today that it reached a milestone in June when the number of ISO 20022 corporate actions announcement messages it has distributed to banks, brokerages and other financial institutions surpassed the 100 million mark.
DTCC, through its subsidiary, The Depository Trust Company (DTC), began distributing ISO 20022 announcement messages in November 2011 after a successful pilot with four leading corporate actions users. More than 30 clients are currently in the process of programming for the messages or are already processing the messages in their production environments.
DTCC routinely announces corporate actions events each year for thousands of issuers. Events include dividend, principal and interest payments, and redemption and reorganization events such as mergers and tender offers.
In September 2012, DTCC launched a second corporate actions pilot program testing ISO 20022 messages covering the full entitlement and allocation lifecycle for distribution events. It began systemic client testing of these messages in February 2013.
“The next milestone for the corporate actions transformation will come in the fourth quarter of 2013 when we begin testing in-bound instruction messages from clients,” said Rob Epstein, DTCC vice president, Asset Services. “This is a major development since it will be the first time clients will be able to submit their instructions for distributions events to DTCC in an automated fashion. Currently, these instructions are communicated to DTCC manually through terminal and browser interfaces. This represents a major gain in efficiency and risk reduction.”
The transition to ISO 20022 messaging is part of DTCC’s overall corporate actions transformation that will see standardized messaging and a new browser-based user interface replace the many legacy platforms that have evolved over the years.
DTCC clients are scheduled to transition to the new interface in the second quarter of 2014. The interface will ultimately incorporate all event types in one system and will cover the entire corporate actions lifecycle from announcements through instructions to allocations.
