After a year of collaboration with Swift and XBRL US, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has finally unveiled the first set of drafts of ISO 20022-based corporate action announcement messages, which are part of its corporate actions re-engineering initiative for the US market. According to the vendor, the move away from proprietary message formats to ISO-based messaging will increase the overall potential for STP within the characteristically paper-based corporate actions environment in the US.
The current set of drafts are for announcement and cancellation advice messages for corporate actions in ISO 20022 formats and are available for review on the DTCC website here. DTCC indicates that more documentation to support additional message types, such as payment messages, will be available later this year. The current drafts were developed using Swift’s standards development utilities and the fact that they are based on the ISO 20022 standard means that they can contain non-standard corporate actions data, which was previously unable to be communicated using ISO 15022.
The new model will now form the basis of the XBRL taxonomy, which is aimed at allowing the tagging of corporate actions source documents. To this end, last month, Max Mansur, global market manager for Asset Servicing at Swift, and David Hands, director of asset services product management at DTCC Solutions, indicated that the group focused on the XBRL and ISO mapping project would have a pilot programme up and running by the end of the year. Hands explains that more work is needed to further align the DTCC and ISO data models and this will be a focus for the group over the coming months.
“Although we have adopted ISO messaging, we still face a situation where about half of the data content is not covered in the message, and in fact is not even in the ISO data dictionary. Therefore, we are using extensions to cover these situations in a consistent, standard format,” he elaborates.
Don Donahue, DTCC chairman and CEO, has also been a champion of XBRL tagging for some time and reckons the drafts are the first significant milestone in the overall effort to fundamentally change the US corporate actions announcement process. “Whether receiving XBRL tagged documents from issuers or communicating with our customers through ISO 20022 messages, a primary goal of DTCC’s corporate action re-engineering project is to help the flow of information between issuers and investors move more smoothly and with fewer errors, at less cost, using a single global standard,” he explains.
Reference Data Review will be speaking to Swift’s own corporate actions champion, Chris Church, chief executive of Americas and global head of securities, about the progress that has been made on this project next week. Check back for the full story then…
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