National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has summed up results of the first year of operation of its Transit 2.0 platform, a system for the automatic exchange of financial messages and other documents between banks and corporations. The platform was launched over the past year; its main task was to unify and standardize interactions between financial market participants, to increase the effectiveness and safety of these interactions.
On 21 March, NSD conducted a special workshop to present the first results of the platform’s operation to potential users of the platform. Specialists from major corporations and banks, and representatives of the Russian Association of Corporate Treasurers (RACT) took part in the event.
Vladimir Kozinets, President of the RACT, pointed out that he saw a great potential in the Transit 2.0 project development, first and foremost, for corporations. The system provides market players, especially holding companies with complex payment structures and a large amount of settlement accounts and legal entities, with clear advantages. The clients can interact with banks via unified channels in simpler, more convenient and affordable ways.
As a rule, any large corporation opens accounts with a few banks to optimize transaction-related services and mitigate risks. To interact with each bank, the corporation has to install an online banking system. The unique feature of Transit 2.0 is an option to conduct electronic document interchange with all Russian banks; thus, NSD provides corporations with a single “out-of-the-box” solution which unifies all the channels with different operational modes and formats. The corporation does not need to interact with each bank separately, it can simply connect to Transit 2.0 and work with all the banks using its unified and convenient format.
Banks also can utilize an additional channel and save costs related to servicing their online banking systems. Meanwhile, NSD offers to each bank a special solution depending on the bank’s business tasks and the number of corporations with which the bank interacts.
The first transaction via the platform was between Alfa-Bank and DIXY in December 2018.
“Our cooperation with NSD was fruitful, it exceeded our expectations. The pilot phase of the Transit 2.0 project has been implemented in a coordinated way. We are happy to say that the testing process is underway and it is progressing quite quickly, and the needs of our company as a client, including those related to Transit 2.0 interface and functionality, are being fully taken into account by NSD. Today’s meeting shows that the market is interested in our experience, and it may be a point for further development of the Transit 2.0 platform,” said Olesya Velikanova, Head of the Settlement Group, DIXY.
“Transit 2.0 is a kind of an ecosystem which includes corporations (typically, major holding companies) and their settlement banks. The value of any platform is very dependent on the circle of its participants; it grows when the circle expands. Now pilot clients use the platform; we hope that by the end of this year they will be using it in the full operation mode,” said Alexander Nam, Managing Director for Technology Services, NSD.
The first phase of the Transit 2.0 implementation has been successfully completed: in 2018, NSD conducted workshops and developed the functionality for conducting ruble transfers. The next phase of the project’s road map is Q2 2019; it includes the elaboration of FX transactions. Also, the road map implies the expansion in the number of participants. By the end of 2019 it is planned to connect about 20 participants to the platform.