"As a leader in the state-of-the-art trading technology, Interactive Brokers Group wants its corporate action processing to be state-of the-art as well," said Brian Sussman, Vice President, Clearing Operations of Interactive Brokers LLC. "By becoming an early adopter and taking DTCC's ISO 20022 announcement messages electronically, we will continue to provide our clients with the most accurate and efficient corporate actions information on a timely and cost-effective basis."

Interactive Brokers Group joins the three pioneering pilot firms - BNY Mellon, Brown Brothers Harriman, and JPMorgan Chase - in processing ISO 20022 announcement messages for corporate actions including dividend, principal and interest, redemption, and reorganization events, such as mergers and tender offers.

"Interactive Brokers is helping set the pace for the rest of the industry by adopting and implementing the ISO 20022 announcement messages early on," said Daniel Thieke, DTCC Managing Director, Asset Services. "With ISO 20022 messaging, Interactive is enhancing customer service, helping reduce risk and enabling greater straight-through processing - well in advance of the 2015 deadline when all DTCC clients currently taking DTC's proprietary CCF files will need to transition to ISO 20022 messaging for announcements."

DTCC, through its subsidiary The Depository Trust Company (DTC), began providing the ISO 20022 announcement messages from its production system in late 2011 following a lengthy pilot program. It launched a second ISO 20022 pilot in September 2012 to test messages that cover the entire lifecycle - including entitlements, instructions, and payments - for distribution events and began systemic client testing of the messages in February 2013. Interactive Brokers will now begin testing the next set of ISO messages for the lifecycle of distribution events.

The transition to ISO 20022 messaging standards is just part of DTCC's overall reengineering initiative that will see see standardized messaging and a new user interface replacing the many legacy platforms that have evolved over the years. DTCC will begin to retire corporate actions proprietary file formats in 2015.