Members of Russia's national securities depository will soon be able to receive information on corporate actions from Russian companies through structured ISO 15022-compliant message formats transmitted on the network operated by SWIFT.
The National Settlement Depository (NSD) will be installing an enterprise-wide data management system from data management software provider GoldenSource to cleanse corporate actions information from multiple sources and forward notifications to over 1,300 broker-dealers, banks and other financial institutions. Implementation is set to begin within the next few months for the multi-phased project, which aims to provide a single communications hub for notifications on corporate events to ease the difficulties financial firms have in accessing data from disparate sources -- government agencies such as the Central Bank of Russia and Ministry of Finance, registrars and issuers - and in unstructured, disparate formats.
"The NSD will be licensing GoldenSource's EDM platform and retaining control of all its operations as well as a repository for storing information on corporate action events," says Neill Vanlint, managing director for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific at GoldenSource's London office.
The NSD already provides information on corporate actions free of charge on its website using a text-format and through a proprietary text file transmission. However, the new commercial datafeed will be far more accurate, more comprehensive, and more efficient to process. "The underlying idea of the NSD's new product line is to provide structured data; therefore, NSD is going to sell convenient services for its customers enabling automated data processing," says a statement issued to globalcustody.net by the NSD's public affairs division in response to e-mailed questions. "Of course, we also expect that the GoldenSource software will help us identify and eliminate discrepancies surfacing in the market. Another important factor is data enrichment, when data received from different sources is combined forming the golden entry containing all of the information currently available in the market."
Automating and centralizing access to information on corporate actions through the NSD's Corporate Information Center (CIC) could certainly go a long way to helping the "internationalization" of Russia's securities market, which has historically lagged others due to inefficient post-trade processing and poor information on financial instruments and their issuers.
"The goal of CIC is to set up a single hub as close to issuers as possible and reshape existing data flows on the market to increase efficiency and reduce the delivery speed and costs of information marketwide," says the statement issued by NSD, which will be accessing corporate actions data directly from issuers and Russia's central bank. As the country's new securities watchdog, the central bank will be receiving the information directly from issuers.
The NSD, which won regulatory blessings as Russia's central securities depository in late 2012, recently took on the settlement of Russian securities transactions in book-entry form, thereby eliminating a cumbersome, potentially error-prone and delayed process for transferring ownership of securities accounts through the records of corporate registrars. Last year, NSD launched a securities information review service to provide structured reference data for securities it serviced. The corporate actions project will initially focus strictly on Russian securities, but will eventually add non-Russian securities to the mix.