NDC hosted General Meeting and BoD meeting of the European Central Securities Depositories Association in St. Petersburg

Ordinary General Meeting and Board of Directors meeting of the European Central Securities Depositories Association (ECSDA) were held on 14 September,

Joel Merere, the ECSDA Board of Director's Chairman stressed that

"ECSDA's primary and general objective is to promote harmonisation of market practices in Europe and to propose solutions to the market with a view to increasing the efficiency of the European capital market. The RussiaЎЇs NDC has become an equal partner by the European CSDs in discussing solutions. We highly appreciate the level of development of the domestic infrastructure which is approaching international standards for the financial markets".

In his welcome speech to the ECSDA members Nikolay Egorov, NDC's Director and a Director of the ECSDA BoD, said

"NDC is proud to host the General Meeting and the Board of Directors meeting of the European Central Securities Depositories Association here in Russia. I would like to underline that cooperation and standardization remain the key drivers in the global integration processes for the whole international financial community. ItЎЇs obvious that all the market participants must have validated, accurate data, consistent throughout the whole infrastructure as information disparity may cause transaction breaks. Since Russia have been integrated in the world market infrastructure and nowadays when the Russian Federation is considered among the most attractive areas for investments, the coordination in improvements with our European colleagues following by a rise in the data quality, used by financial institutions (their front, middle and back-offices), is closely connected with the capital market efficiency as well as operational risk and expenditures reduction".

Reference about ECSDA:

The European Central Securities Depositories Association (ECSDA) was founded in 1997 in Madrid in order to provide a forum for CSDs to exchange views and take forward projects of mutual interest. ECSDA offers solutions and provides advice on economic, financial, legal and regulatory matters to reduce risk and increase efficiency in pre-settlement, settlement and custody for securities and related payments across Europe. 

ECSDA is composed by 42 (I)CSDs in the geographical area of Europe.

Currently ECSDA promotes common standards to remove existing cross-border barriers identified in Giovannini and Group of 30 reports.

Reference about NDC:

NDC, the biggest Russian settlement depository, is actively involved in developing common reference data standards. Thus, accordingly to the resolution of the ANNA Board of Directors, in 2006 NDC started to perform the complete range of functions of the National Numbering Agency for Russia. Nowadays NDC allocates ISIN (ISO 6166) codes to Russian securities and other financial instruments. NDC also allocates CFI Codes to securities in accordance with the ISO10962 Standard, supports data description methodology for Russian securities and provides ISIN&CFI daily data update to the ANNA base. NDC has already worked on the barrier removal by implementing announcement standards. All the reference data from the issuer and registrar are immediately verified, reformatted to the electronic form and disclosed both in Russian and English languages at the NDC's web site. As for NDC clients, certain corporate announcements are mailed them directly.

Among NDC's founders are Bank of Russia and MICEX (the founders' shares in the property are 46,7% and 39,3% respectively, and in the votes 50,2%  and 42,3% respectively). Members include Bank of Moscow, Sberbank, International Moscow Bank, JP Morgan Bank International LLC, VTB Bank (Vneshtorgbank), Vnesheconombank, Rossiysky Credit Bank, Evrofinans Mosnarbank, Rosbank, Gazprombank, ING Bank Eurasia, and Deutsche Bank.