Telekurs Financial is gearing up for the production release next month of ISO 15022-formatted corporate actions data as part of the Swift initiative to bring third-party data vendors onto its Swiftnet network. Telekurs released test data for the ISO 15022 service to clients in January; the company confirmed its roll-out plans at a client briefing late last month.
The ISO 15022 standard governs delivery format for a range of information types, including corporate actions or events, collateral management, custody account management and interdepository messages. The new Telekurs service is focusing entirely on corporate actions data at the moment.
Swift has encouraged third-party vendors to develop ISO 15022 corporate actions services as part of its pilot programme to bring the vendors onto the Swiftnet network for the first time. The organization has come under pressure from its bank clients to open up the network to information suppliers. The vendors, in turn, have relished the opportunity to use the network to reach some 7,500 bank participants.
Telekurs appears to be the first of the pilot participants to commit to a production version of its service. The other data vendor participants are Bloomberg, Exchange Data International, FT Interactive Data, the London Stock Exchange, Next Info, Reuters, Standard & Poor’s, Thomson Financial, ValueLink and WM.
Bank participants in the programme include Bank of New York (London), Banque Central de Luxembourgh, Banque Degroof (Luxemburg), Credit Lyonnais (Luxemburg), HSBC (London), ING (Brussels), Master Trust Bank of Japan (Tokyo), Royal Bank of Canada (Jersey) and VP Bank (Liechtenstein). Software houses ABI Informatic and Datasphere are also involved in the programme.
Under the programme, Swift is seeking to streamline the corporate action work flow process by making it less manual. Currently, corporate actions from custodians and independent market data providers must be matched manually before being passed on to the client for processing and confirmation. This cumbersome arrangement, it is hoped, will be replaced when the vendors adopt ISO 15022 messaging for the initial matching with custodian events.
Swift has five message types for handling the corporate actions data on its network. The message types in ISO 15022 format are: MT564 for notifications; MT565 for instructions; MT566 for confirmations; MT567 for status; and MT568 for narrative. Vendors will distribute their information using the MT564 and MT568 message type.
Swift was expected to give the go-ahead to introducing the vendors onto Swiftnet at its AGM this month. Once the go-ahead is given, participating vendors will be free to start introducing services. Full service is expected to be achieved by October, following a phased implementation over the summer. The initial pilot phase consisted of two development phases.
The first of these introduced cash and stock distributions, capital transactions, mergers and offers, exchanges, redemptions, conversion/exercise and name changes. The second, during live customer testing, brought in calls/puts, amortizations, meetings and redenominations. The final development phase – during live service to begin next month – will add listing events, installments, class actions and bankruptcies, leading to full service by the October deadline.
For its ISO 15022 service, Telekurs is planning two delivery options. The first is via Swiftnet, using Telekurs’ Valordata Feed Server (VDFS) as the originating data source and the straight ISO 15022 messaging format, with batch delivery of files. The second is via the Internet, using the Telekurs VDF feed in conjunction with the ISO 15022 standard with access via FTP.
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