The initiative credits BSE to be the first Securities Market Infrastructure member of SWIFT in India.

SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, the member-owned cooperative that enables more than than 9,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 209 countries to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably.

Processing corporate actions manually places a heavy drain on resources. Errors during corporate actions processing can result in significant financial losses. The sheer volume of listed companies in India and the number of possible corporate actions, it is a challenge for the custodians to collect reliable and timely information of corporate actions.

BSE as the 'source of truth' for corporate actions has taken up the initiative to resolve the issues faced by custodians in processing corporate actions by introducing the Corporate Actions Service over the SWIFT network. As a part of this process BSE has worked closely with the custodian community to evolve the messaging formats based on the ISO 15022 standard suitable for the Indian Securities Markets.

The Service combines the strengths of ISO 15022 messaging standards and SWIFT connectivity to enable the standardisation and automation of corporate actions, secure communication flows between information sources, market infrastructures, local agents, global custodians and Investment Managers. It involves a secure exchange of proprietary data while ensuring its confidentiality and integrity.

The initiative will help BSE in streamlining the process of disseminating authentic data directly to the custodians, leading to quicker announcements at significantly higher reliability and lower costs. It will improve processing timelines and provide comprehensive coverage for event types. It will also facilitate simultaneous dissemination of information to all custodians and reliability of the same for them.

Mr. Madhu Kannan, Managing Director & CEO, BSE said, "SWIFT solution will give custodians access to high quality data on corporate actions. There is a lot of interest in the international arena for corporate actions data from India, and I believe the potential for this tie up is quite high."

"This is a terrific example of the Indian financial community working together to standardise and automate around a key market infrastructure using the global financial co-operative that they own, which is SWIFT," says Arun Tiwari, Head of India and the Sub-continent for SWIFT. "That's exactly the purpose of SWIFT and that's why we are committed to India: to support the Indian financial sector establish best practice for the benefit of its existing and future customers in India and around the world."