Tag Archive for Target2-Securities

Target2-Securities Shareholders Visibility in Cross Border Environment

On 11 March 2009 the T2S Team organised a conference for EU issuers, primarily of equity securities. The aim of the event was for the Eurosystem to clarify the scope of T2S and discuss the project’s impact on issuers and their agents. The most important topic identified in that conference was the need for issuers to be able to identify their shareholders in a cross border environment. It is evident that T2S per se does not create the problem. This is an existing issue where- and whenever cross border transaction activity is present. However, the creation of a single settlement engine for Europe may intensify the issue due to the expected increase in cross border activity associated with T2S and may thus increase the desirability of a harmonised approach.

ISO 20022 Standards and SWIFT

The T2S User Requirements Document (URD) states that “The T2S Interface shall use ISO 20022 as its single standard for all communications, both inbound and outbound”. Therefore messages have to be either ISO20022 registered, or at least compliant with the methodology of ISO200221. SWIFT plays an important role in the registration process of ISO 20022standards and in the development of messages for T2S. Therefore, at its meeting of 9-10 October, the AG agreed that clarification was needed on the relationship between ISO 20022standards and SWIFT2.

Technical Group 3 Analysis of Target2-Securities Dedicated Cash Accounts

During its 28/29 November 2007 meeting, the Advisory Group agreed to add possible functionality in the URD on the prioritisation of multiple T2S dedicated cash accounts. The AG also asked TG3 to analyse the issue in more depth and the 3CB+ to calculate the additional costs of this approach. The AG agreed to review the matter in view of the feedback from the public consultation and the cost and the consequences for the market. Following the AG decision, the prioritisation of multiple T2S dedicated cash accounts functionality was immediately added into the URD by the project team.

Target2-Securities Economic Impact Analysis Status Report

On 18 December 2007, the ECB published the TARGET2-Securities (T2S) User Requirements Document for public consultation. In parallel, the ECB published a note setting out the proposed methodology for the economic impact analysis (EIA) of T2S. This note proposed two indicators to evaluate the potential benefits of T2S for market participants and the European economy. The first indicator is the average cost per settlement instruction. The aim of this indicator is to focus on a direct comparison between the cost per settlement instruction with T2S and the current market structures without T2S.

Target2-Securities User-Focused Programme Plan Cover Note

This consolidated programme plan encompasses all Eurosystem activities and is based on the ECB’s internal detailed planning and an extract of the 4CB’s internal planning. As part of the consolidation exercise, the project office of the ECB and of the 4CB tried to minimise the impact of the 7 additional months needed for the validation of the General Functional Specifications, without impacting the scope of T2S, the expected quality of the final delivery, the price or the go-live date. This was achieved through an increased parallelism of activities, in particular in the production of the UDFS and the conduct of the Eurosystem and User Acceptance testing phases.