The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) 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 ten million SSIs now included in the service. This is an increase of 12% in the past twelve 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,” said Moira Kiernan, DTCC director in the Product Management division,c in a statement. “With ten 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 ten million SSIs, 30% 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.
“Across our top six clients, we’ve seen a 39% reduction in fails due specifically to incomplete or unmatched SSI data. For our largest client on GC Direct, we’ve seen a 54% reduction in fails,” said Bob Stewart, senior vice president and head of Global Custody Product at Brown Brothers Harriman, in DTCC’s report.
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.