The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, has announced that DTCC’s ALERT, the industry’s largest and most compliant web-based global database for the maintenance and communication of account and standing settlement instructions (SSIs), has passed a key milestone with over 10 million SSIs now included in the service — an increase of 12 per cent in the past 12 months.
“SSIs represent a substantial pain point for firms, as missing or incomplete SSIs can lead to trade failures. The increased use of ALERT is confirmation of the financial service industry’s continued focus on automation and addressing this important area of the post-trade process,” says Moira Kiernan, DTCC Director, Product Management.
“With 10 million SSIs now in ALERT, the service has become the central SSI utility to reduce trade fails and increase operational efficiencies, creating significant benefits from the centralization and automation of high quality, golden source data.”
Of the 10 million SSIs, 30 per cent are now administered by data source providers through its custodian-managed model, Global Custodian Direct (GC Direct). Through the GC Direct workflow, custodian banks and prime brokers become the owner and manager of SSIs for their buy-side clients, further automating the maintenance of SSIs and driving the prevalence of reliable source data. Increasing efficiencies and reducing touch points are high priorities for the financial services industry, further amplified by the Covid-19 pandemic and in anticipation of the Central Securities Depositories Regulation’s (CSDR) Settlement Discipline Regime to be implemented in February 2022, which introduces penalty fees for failing transactions.
ALERT significantly reduces trade failure by enabling a community of investment managers, broker/dealers and custodian banks to share accurate account and SSI data automatically worldwide including automated enrichment of transactions within DTCC’s Margin Transit Utility (MTU) offering as well as within DTCC’s CTM central matching service through a rules-based engine called ALERT Key Auto Select (AKAS). With 3,325 clients, ALERT provides broad market coverage supporting all the depositories across the globe (150+ as published by SMPG) and more than 30 derivatives exchanges.
