ICBC Financial Services Uses XSP to Adopt ISO 20022

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Financial Services (ICBCFS) has begun using SunGard's XSPrisa software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to process corporate actions in ISO 20022, as part of its preparations for the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation's (DTCC) transition to the standard.

ICBCFS has until now used XSPrisa to process DTCC's corporate actions CCF (computer-to-computer facility) files. ICBCFS has now chosen to adopt ISO 20022 to help it prepare for the changes DTCC is making to its corporate actions systems, and because it believes the enhanced data elements of the ISO standard will help to mitigate risk and improve straight-through processing (STP).

"XSPrisa provides a simplified, calendar-based diary of corporate actions events relative to the customer's daily holdings, which allows for review and validation of corporate actions terms, end-client notification, and response capture, tabulation and processing," says Brendan Farrell, New York-based executive vice president, general manager, at SunGard's XSP business.

Farrell says ICBCFS's transition to ISO 20022 involved creating a parallel test environment where XSP consumed the corporate actions data ICBC uploaded, so the users could conduct a series of comparisons ensuring that the legacy DTCC files contained the same data and quality of announcements as the new ISO 20022 formats.

Farrell says his company is seeing a "rapid adoption" of ISO 20022 messages for DTCC corporate actions processing. He anticipates approximately 50% of XSPrisa's North American client base will be using the ISO standard by the end of the year.