Waters Rankings 2016: Best Sell-Side Clearing Provider — The DTCC

Having established itself at the vanguard of clearing services for equities and fixed-income, particularly in North America where the firm clears and settles almost all broker-to-broker equity, listed corporate, municipal bonds and unit investment trust transactions, the DTCC continues to focus on both its core competencies of improving data standardization and harmony, and branching out its services into new arenas.

One of the biggest success stories for the DTCC over the past 12 months was the launch of Clarient, a standardized reference data service and entity hub for verifying client information, developed in cooperation with six sell-side banks and several major buy-side firms. The service has garnered huge interest from both sides of the industry, including investment managers, corporations, trusts, outsourcers, broker-dealers and banks, as well as winning the title of best reference data newcomer for its innovative Public KYC Service at this year’s Inside Market Data/Inside Reference Data Awards.

In January this year, the DTCC announced the sale of the position reconciliation technology assets of its DTCC Loan/SERV (Loan/SERV) service to UK-based data vendor Markit, now renamed IHS Markit since its merger with Colorado-based IHS in early July. Around 400 asset managers, representing approximately 6,000 funds in the global syndicated loan market, utilize the Loan/SERV loan position reconciliation service to reconcile over 1 million positions, with records maintained by administrative agent banks. The DTCC will continue to host and support the Loan/SERV service within its datacenters on IHS Markit’s behalf until the full integration is completed, which is expected to occur by the end of the year.

The DTCC has been heavily involved in the research and development of blockchain and distributed-ledger technologies. The firm was recently involved in a number of distributed-ledger proofs-of-concept (POCs), including a repo POC with US-based specialist Digital Asset Holdings and an industry-led credit default swaps (CDS) initiative in collaboration with Axoni, Markit, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan, which saw a 100 percent success rate across 85 test cases looking at the capabilities of blockchain and smart contracts to manage the post-trade lifecycle events of standard North American single-name CDSs. 

One of the biggest success stories for the DTCC over the past 12 months was the launch of Clarient, a standardized reference data service and entity hub for verifying client information, developed in cooperation with six sell-side banks and several major buy-side firms.