DTCC Completes Move To CA Web From Legacy Systems

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has completed its migration from the legacy Participant Terminal System (PTS) and Participant Browser Service (PBS) to the Corporate Actions Web (CA Web) service, which it launched in October.

In addition, CA Web has a new inbound instruction message that allows users to respond to the DTCC on election options for corporate actions using an ISO 20022 message, according to Dan Thieke, managing director and general manager of settlement and asset services at the corporation.

"As we test with our clients, there's a lot of anticipation to go live with the inbound instruction functionality," he says. "The automation piece is based on clients' ability to build out their functions and migrate."

The completion of CA Web migration also helps to promote the adoption of the ISO 20022 standard, Thieke adds. For corporate actions, he says the DTCC went directly to this standard, bypassing the earlier ISO 15022. "Other providers will have to effectively phase out 15022 over time," he notes.

Next phase

CA Web's completed migration from PTS and PBS does not mark the end of the changes, however, according to Thieke. DTCC's next phase will be the addition of ISO 20022 messaging for redemptions, including maturities, full calls and partial calls. Thieke expects this to be available by the end of this year, and for redemption users to be migrated onto CA Web in 2016.

"We're in the process of mapping out the timeline for reorganization events, but we will clearly follow the implementation for redemptions," he says.

Overall, the migration to CA Web eliminates manual entry of corporate actions instructions and should yield greater straight-through processing.

"The old environment requires our clients to go into our interface and type those in manually, which can be subject to error. With ISO messaging, we and the clients can do that in an automated fashion, which eliminates the risk of submitting those manually," says Thieke.

"They can effectively take in an ISO message for an announcement and pass it on electronically to their client, who can submit instructions back to them electronically, and then have those submitted back electronically to DTCC," he adds.

In January, Thieke described the changes made in earlier stages of the migration to CA Web.