Articles

Next year Gerard Hartsink plans to step down as chairman of the GLEIF, having turned a start-up, for which he had to raise the money to pay the staff, into a soundly based and internationally recognised campaigner, in co-operation with his regulators, for widespread adoption of LEIs. The next challenge is to wide and accelerate adoption of […]

Mr. Lee Byungrhae, chairman and CEO of the Korea Securities Depository (KSD), and chairman of the Asia-Pacific Central Securities Depository Group (ACG), will, as chairman of the World Forum of CSDs (WFC), make opening remarks at the WFC 2019 conference in Marrakech on Tuesday 9 April 2019. As he told Dominic Hobson, Mr. Lee sees […]

The 14-year-old Association of Eurasian Central Securities Depositories (AECSD) unites 15 central securities depositories (CSDs) of the Eurasian region. Dominic Hobson talked to Dmitry Ivanov, head of securities account network management at the National Settlement Depository (NSD) in Moscow, and Secretary of the AECSD since 2016, about what his members are thinking and worrying about. […]

Mohamed Abdel Salam, the chairman and managing director of the Egyptian CSD, MCDR, doubles as president of the 38-member Africa and Middle East Depositories Association (AMEDA), which is hosting the World Forum of CSDs in Marrakech in April next year. The biggest challenge confronting his members, he says, is to ensure their revenues cover their […]

Work with FinTechs, to learn from them and build bridges with them to regulated markets. Use new digital technologies to lower costs for clients rather than for yourselves. Think across the silos that separate trading from clearing from settlement from custody. Remember that CSDs keep assets safe and remind investors of it. Do not fear […]

As a technologist, Vipin Mahabirsingh is excited by the opportunities as well as the threats of blockchain. As the managing director of a CSD, he is cautious about rushing it into production. But it is as an engineer that he is best able to distinguish between what is hype and what will drive adoption of […]

Dek: The Moroccan CSD has spent two decades building systems, processes and personnel whose purpose is to convince domestic and international investors that its services can be relied upon to safekeep their financial assets. Now that those services meet international standards in both resilience and cyber-security, the MAROCLEAR CEO and chairperson Fathïa Bennis is tilting […]

It takes a brave CSD to adopt blockchain as the foundation of its core systems, yet the technology is nevertheless rich in new opportunities for CSDs, notably as data managers. But the least risky way for CSDs to experiment with blockchain is by growing in tandem with the crypto- asset markets, says Alexander Chekanov, chief […]

The securities industry appears so far to have experienced fewer cyber-attacks than the payments industry, but that does not mean it is not being attacked already, or immune to a catastrophic failure of cyber-security. Marc Bayle, director general, market infrastructure and payments, at the European Central Bank (ECB), warns that CSDs may experience cyber-attacks locally […]

Charlie Shin is well-placed to assess the potential value of DLT to CSDs. A computer science graduate who has worked in an AI laboratory, he has participated in a series of J2EE projects since he joined KSD in 1999 and is now working on AI and DLT platforms as a head of the innovative technology […]

CSDs are expected by their uses to explore new technologies as paths to lower costs and reduced risks. They are also in a powerful position to influence the pace at which new technologies are adopted. Dan Thieke, managing director and general manager for settlement and asset services at the DTCC, advises CSDs to work with […]

A string of European regulations are rich in potential for tension between CSDs and their users over responsibility for settlement failures, shortcomings in the exercise of shareholder rights, and especially the loss of investor assets. With other regulators adopting similar ideas, and inter-operability spilling the risks across borders as well, the scope for regulatory disputes […]

Joe Lubin, co-founder of Ethereum and founder and CEO of ConsenSys, is the keynote speaker at WFC 2019. As Dominic Hobson found out, he has a radical and exciting vision of the future of CSDs. To him, blockchain is more opportunity than threat to CSDs. But they must be prepared to reorient their strategies away […]

The raison d’être of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) is to expedite the flow of capital across national borders, so it is no surprise that Nandini Sukumar, chief executive of the WFE since March 2015 and a panelist in the session on how CSDs can meet the rising expectations of their stakeholders, would welcome […]

Central securities depositories (CSDs) have long recognised the opportunities which lies in linking their services across borders, but it has proved hard to realise them. Vivekanand Ramgopal (“Vivek”), vice president and co-head of TCS Financial Solutions at Tata Consultancy Services, advises CSDs to temper their ambition with a realistic assessment of what can be done […]

By the time Tom Harrington left the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2012, after 30 years with the agency, the last two as associate deputy director in Washington, the financial crimes group in which he started his career had become the largest arm of the entire organization. It is a measure of how the […]

The Casablanca Stock Exchange (CSE) is at the centre of an ambitious official strategy to turn its home city into a financial hub for international investment in sub-Saharan Africa. It is obviously working, since dozens of major fund and firms are basing their African operations in Morocco, and the CSE is leading a project to […]

The processes by which companies innovate and diversify are the most talked-about and least understood of any in business. Mathias Papenfuss, head of regulatory implementation at Clearstream and chairman of ECSDA, draws on his experience of the mutating European industry of the last 20 years to portray change at CSDs as the outcome of complex […]

Complying with the international regulatory standards stipulated by the G30, CPMI-IOSCO, FTSE Russell and MSCI has become the default method for developing markets to attract foreign investors. But Bruce Lawrence, founder of the HBL financial market infrastructure consultancy, warns that an undue obsession with international standards can also lead to complacency, a failure to take […]

CSDs tend to be faithful adherents to regulatory requirements, and the CPMI-IOSCO principles for financial market infrastructures are no exception. But the way in which CSDs operate can leave residual areas of risk that are not always picked up by regulators. Risks also mutate over time. Which is why Jim Micklethwaite, head of operations at […]

CSDs, like other financial institutions, create and store data every time they settle a transaction or move an asset between accounts. Retrieving the details of a transaction is akin to the proverbial search for a needle-in-a-haystack. That did not matter much until regulators started demanding better data management and control as part of their efforts […]

CSDs have lost their fear of blockchain and are now pioneering its application to the securities industry, say Andreas Lundell and Tony Sio of Nasdaq, which provides post-trade technologies to CSDs, include a corporate actions notifications and instructions service that is attracting a lot of interest. Lundell and Sio urge CSDs to reduce the risks […]

The threats and opportunities created by blockchain are real enough, says Javier Jara, business innovation manager at the Chilean CSD and vice president of the Americas’ Central Securities Depository Association (ACSDA), and CSDs should be willing to a pay a short-term price to secure a crucial role in ensuring blockchain networks are safely adopted and […]

No regional association of CSDs has more members, or more complicated regulatory challenges, than ECSDA. As a result, managing member priorities and compliance demands is less like dealing with a single conflagration than keeping a series of smaller blazes under constant control. Anna Kulik, secretary general of ECSDA, says she is currently focusing on a […]

ISSA is still mistakenly characterised as an association for custodian banks. In reality, CSDs  have belonged to the association and contributed to its work since its first meeting 40 years ago. With the gradual emergence of WFC since the first CSD conference in 1991, a fruitful division of labour has developed, with ISSA hosting dialogue […]

As an integral part of the securities industry, CSDs have so far escaped systemic or devastating cyber-attacks, but their good fortune cannot last, precisely because they are systemically important institutions. Protection requires money, talent and especially perseverance. For CSDs daunted by the resources required, SWIFT offers a useful guide to action, and a forum for […]

As systemically important infrastuctures charged with making their markets more attractive to investors, CSDs have to work out how to remain extremely robust while simultaneously cutting costs charged to users and meeting demands for more and better-quality services. Gökçe Iliriş, head of international relations and corporate communications at the Turkish CSD, thinks the best answers […]

The deflation of a tech bubble is apt to obscure the fact that not all investment in new technology is wasted.  Just as the FAANGs emerged from the TMT bubble of the late 1990s, the useful and scalable applications of blockchain are almost certainly being built now. Their impact on CSDs could be as little […]

Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) is running one of the highest-profile blockchain projects in the securities industry. If its origins are specific (to resolve operational challenges for international financial institutions and investors executing a growing volume of Stock Connect trades that settle to T+0 timetable) and its focus narrow (getting post-trade processes in shape […]