The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, announced that Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (SEB) has recently gone live with DTCCs new ALERT for Regional Custodian workflow via global custodian Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH).
DTCC is partnering with our clients and the industry to transform institutional trade processing by driving out the inefficiencies in the post-trade processing lifecycle and enabling full trade lifecycle management providing transparency and oversight from pre-trade/account enablement through to settlement finality. Automating the exchange of standing settlement instructions (SSIs) has provided efficiency for early adopter custodians.
With the ALERT Regional Custodian workflow, clients can automatically connect with users of the ALERT Global Custodian Direct (GC Direct) workflow, enabling SSIs to be exchanged between a custodians central repository and ALERT on behalf of a regional custodian. BBH, the first custodian to onboard regional custodian-affiliated investment managers to the service, has been a user of ALERT GC Direct since 2015. Today, more than 3,000 clients use ALERT to manage over seven million SSIs.
SEB will leverage the Regional Custodian Workflow which utilizes ALERT for storing SSI data related to fund assets in its custody and will automate the sharing of data managed by global custodians for security, cash-based and collateral SSIs.
SEB has been using ALERT for many years together with our clients. Therefore, we see the implementation of the Regional Custodian workflow, together with our partner BBH, as a natural step forward, said Niklas Nyberg, Head of Products Global Custody at SEB. The new Regional Custodian workflow will increase efficiency and mitigate operational risk when managing SSI data in ALERT. With this workflow, we are able to offer our clients automated streamlined access to ALERT, simplifying the SSI data management process.
BBH is thrilled to continue our collaboration with DTCC and facilitate our clients use of the ALERT Regional Custodian workflow, said Robert Stewart, Senior Vice President at BBH. We are able to assist in onboarding funds serviced by regional custodians which were previously out-of-scope, streamlining client adoption and improving SSI data management. The offering is well-aligned with our commitment to providing our global clients with industry-leading solutions that increase controls, mitigate risk and provide a superior client experience.
DTCC ALERTs Regional Custodian workflow enables investment managers and regional custodians to jointly leverage the GC Direct workflow, allowing regional custodians to maintain an electronic signature of account approval and the assignment of SSI data ownership to the global custodian, said Bill Meenaghan, Executive Director, ALERT at DTCC. By adopting this workflow, investment managers and regional custodians outsource SSI maintenance and distribution with the global custodian. This preferred workflow brings greater automation and efficiency to the process and reduces the operational burden.
