The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) today announced that Raymond James & Associates, has chosen DTCC's Global Corporate Action Validation Service (GCA VS) to help them automate, streamline and reduce risk associated with corporate actions announcements.
The GCA Validation Service provides a centralized source of corporate action announcements for equities and fixed-income instruments traded in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. In 2006, GCA VS provided almost 900,000 corporate actions announcements on more than 1.5 million securities in 160 countries around the world.
"We selected GCA VS to complement our installation of Tata's NCS Corporate Actions Systems software. With this combination we expect to achieve straight through processing for a large percentage of our corporate actions events," said Trudy Bixby, senior vice president, Securities Operations, Raymond James and Associates.
"We're very proud to have been selected as Raymond James' provider," said James Femia, DTCC managing director and head of the Global Corporate Action business. "We're investing substantial resources to ensure GCA VS is delivering comprehensive, accurate and timely information that meets the global requirements of our customers."
Raymond James joins a growing number of other major global financial institutions and buy-side firms using DTCC's GCA Validation Service, including Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan Securities, Merrill Lynch, and UBS, among others. DTCC has more than 30 years of experience in handling corporate actions information and processing for U.S. securities and securities from more than 100 other countries which are also held at DTCC's depository.
Corporate actions are one of the last significant areas of risk associated with manual and non-standardized processing in the securities industry. According to a 2004 study sponsored by DTCC and conducted by Oxera, an economics consultancy in Europe, the risk from just one mishandled corporate action event could impact thousands of investor clients and cost tens of millions of euros for individual securities firms - and multi-billion euros for the global securities industry.
"Outsourcing corporate actions announcements is a growing trend in the inddustry, which is providing a cost effective way for firms to obtain high quality, fast and accurate information on corporate actions announcements globally," Femia said.