About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

DTCC Extends to Dividend, Redemption and Reorganisation Services for Canada

Subscribe to our newsletter

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has enhanced its settlement link with CDS Clearing and Depository Services to offer new corporate action services including dividend, redemption and reorganisation services. Patrick Kirby, DTCC managing director for Asset Services, explains to Reference Data Review that the expansion of the services in this area is a result of customer demand.

The Canadian-Link Services, which went into operation in 2005, supports the processing and settlement of transactions in Canadian dollars at the Depository Trust Company (DTC), a DTCC subsidiary. “DTCC launched the Canadian-Link Services to better serve our customers who, at the time, had to maintain split inventories in Canadian and US securities,” explains Kirby. “The service allowed them to concentrate all US and Canadian security positions in their account at the DTC.”

The decision to expand Canadian-Link services was taken in response to customers who said they wanted DTC to offer additional corporate actions services, he says. Under the original program, DTC customers could clear and settle Canadian dollars at DTC, but they had to turn to CDS or other custodians for corporate actions.

“They were looking for ‘one stop’ shopping and wanted to do it at DTC. The expansion enables DTC customers to receive and make payments on all corporate actions events for eligible Canadian issues – approximately 1,000 are now eligible – including tender offers and rights issues in Canadian dollars or a mix of US and Canadian dollars,” continues Kirby.

The DTCC started the development process for the new services at the end of last year and put the new systems into place in July. “We were able to leverage existing systems and adapt them for the Canadian-Link,” he says.

Kirby believes that the new services significantly expand the Canadian-Link Services programme by offering DTC customers new processing capabilities for income, redemption and corporate action payments. For interest and dividend payments, DTC customers also can take advantage of DTC’s Elective Dividend Service (EDS).

With EDS, DTC customers will be able to obtain ‘at-source’ tax relief for Canadian issues, which allows them to pay the lower tax rate at the time of a dividend payment, rather than a higher or maximum rate. This allows investors to eliminate the expensive and time consuming processing associated with cross border hard copy tax reclamation, claims Kirby. “It also limits the interfaces and the repositioning they will have to do, streamlining cross border trading and making clearance and settlement and corporate actions processing more efficient.”

He is confident that the take up of the new services will be strong due to its foundation in customer requests. “Our customers came to us with the request for additional corporate action services, and we developed them based on customer feedback. We won’t have to encourage these customers to get on board,” he says.

Over the next few months the DTCC will be working on creating some additional automation such as cash settlement reporting on the link, adds Kirby.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Unlocking value: Harnessing modern data platforms for data integration, advanced investment analytics, visualisation and reporting

4 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes Modern data platforms are bringing efficiencies, scalability and powerful new capabilities to institutions and their data pipelines. They are enabling the use of new automation and analytical technologies that are also helping firms to derive more value from their data and...

BLOG

Ensuring AI-Focussed Institutions Take out the Garbage: A-Team Group Webinar Preview

As data quality rises up institutions’ AI-implementation agendas, the next A-Team Group Data Management Insight webinar will take a deep-dive look into how they can ensure the information they feed into their models will give them accurate and valuable outputs. Avoiding Chaos The data management maxim of “garbage in, garbage out” can’t be more appropriate for artificial...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...