DTCC announced the enhancement to its award-winning service today at Sibos 2005, SWIFT's annual industry conference, in Copenhagen.

GCA Validation Service provides a centralised source of "scrubbed" information about corporate actions, including tender offers, conversions, stock splits, and nearly 100 other types of events for equities and fixed-income instruments traded in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas.

The ISO 15022-compliant GCA service delivers comprehensive, accurate and timely information, helping to optimise front-office trading and reduce operational losses.

"Expanding access to the GCA Validation Service via SWIFTNet will make it easier for banks, brokers, investment managers, hedge funds and insurance companies to access DTCC's rich, state-of-the-art information repository," said James Femia, DTCC managing director and head of the Global Corporate Action business. "We made the decision to broaden access based on customer requests in the global marketplace."

The GCA Validation Service provides global reach around the clock every business day of the year with more than 60 corporate actions specialists fluent in 16 languages. Last year, GCA Validation provided corporate action information on more than 900,000 events across the globe. DTCC itself is the world's largest processor of corporate actions, with its depository subsidiary handling events valued at US$2.3 trillion in 2004 on more than 2 million securities issues in custody.

"DTCC and SWIFT share a similar goal: to help their customers achieve true, end-to-end STP globally. This effort demonstrates our mutual commitment to this goal in the corporate actions arena," said Francis Remacle, Head of Securities Industry Division, SWIFT.

GCA customers include Credit Suisse First Boston, JP Morgan Securities, Inc., Merrill Lynch, UBS and other leading financial institutions, including broker/dealers, banks and hedge funds.

The service is provided through Global Asset Solutions LLC, a DTCC subsidiary.

As an IP-based messaging system, SWIFTNet provides the security of a private network while delivering the data-processing efficiency of ISO 15022 compliance. Subscribers automatically receive new and updated corporate action event messages without having to initiate downloading of large batch files.