National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, announces that it has begun using the KYC Registry, a database accumulating standardized and systematized information on financial organizations from across the world, to check its counterparties and clients. The KYC Registry allows NSD (and other users) to assess information required to establish new correspondent relations and to monitor existing ones, as well as for safe data exchange with correspondent banks. Along with other sources, NSD will use KYC Registry data to check clients and to establish correspondent relations with counterparties.
The KYC Registry was developed by SWIFT. It contains a large amount of data and documents related to counterparties. To date, the KYC Registry contains information about organizations from 138 countries. In 2014, members of a working group representing global market participants adopted an information standard for data collection in the KYC Registry system and also approved its implementation; it allows data owners to share information with their counterparties. All KYC Registry participants retain ownership rights to their information and fully control the level of other financial institutions’ access to it.