With Fatca withholding expected to become effective on 1 July 2014, financial intermediaries worldwide are running out of time to prepare their systems and processes for compliance.
To help ease the burden for its clients, SIX Financial Information has released the universe of affected securities well in advance of the effective date, allowing ample lead time for thorough testing.
"Given the fact that FATCA is an extreme priority for the financial industry and sensing clients' immense time constraints, we decided to make it our priority to implement our solution as soon as possible. Today, we are pleased to be able to give our clients a head start with our comprehensive and up-to-date FATCA offering," said Dominique Tanner, Head Business Development at SIX Financial Information.
The instrument classifications needed to comply with FATCA are available in Valordata Feed (VDF), where relevant instruments are identified within the 12 million instrument universe and are classified as in scope, exempt grandfathered, or exempt short-term. In the future, SIX will monitor the grandfathered instruments for material modifications, leveraging its award-winning corporate actions data service for this specialized compliance activity.
"While the initial flagging of FATCA instrument status is clearly a big step toward compliance, the true benefit for our clients will be realized in the long-run as we provide automatic updates on material modifications. We have the processes and systems in place to recognize and transmit when a grandfathering status has changed, and tracking those changes is arguably the most challenging aspect of ongoing FATCA compliance," said Dirk Sebald, Head Product Management and Marketing at SIX Financial Information.
In addition to data on instrument level, SIX plans to incorporate the Global Intermediary Identification Number (GIIN) - the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) identifier for participating Foreign Financial Institutions. GIINs will be linked to VDF issuer data when published by the IRS, expected in June 2014. Importantly, the GIINs will be cross-referenced with other entity level identifiers such as the LEI that already exist in our comprehensive database of global securities and issuer data.