New ISO Messages for Corporate Actions Released
July 26, 2010
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corp Monday said it released for public comment the first draft of its new corporate action messages to support the processing of the entire lifecycle of a corporate action including entitlements, elections and payments.
The DTCC’s documentation can be found under http://www.dtcc.com/leadership/reengineering/corp_actions/specs.php. “We’re urging our corporate action customers to review these new documents carefully in the next several months and provide us with their input,” says Patrick Kirby, DTCC’s managing director for asset services.
The new corporate action message types are part of the DTCC’s corporate actions reengineering initiative that will be phased in over the next several years. The DTCC’s goal is to replace 60 legacy systems that currently support corporate actions with a single new platform that allows users to manage their entire corporate action lifecycle from announcements through instructions to payments.
The DTCC says that it worked with the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications to create its new corporate action messages are derivations or “extensions” of the International Organization for Standardization- 20022 compliant messages. SWIFT has promoted the ISO 20022 compliant messages as an upgrade to its current ISO 15022 message types. Both the ISO 20022 messages and the ISO 15022 messages flow through the SWIFT operated messaging network, a popular one for financial firms.
In its documentation, the DTCC defined what additional information will be included in these extensions and how they will be formatted for corporate actions messaging. The DTCC also included new corporate action event templates as well as event scenarios. The event templates list the data elements by event type which are supported by DTCC for the U.S. market. Corporate action scenarios identify all event mapping scenarios which are useful when there is no simple one-to-one mapping between legacy files and ISO 20022.
Last year alone, the umbrella organization for clearance and settlement of U.S. transactions, processed more than $3 trillion in corporate actions. Kirby says that the new ISO-derived messages for corporate action announcements will be available in 2011.
