Alison Clare

It is critical that this is done as quickly and thoroughly as possible as this then starts the internal processing and is used as the basis of the information that is sent to clients," explains Alison Clare, vice president, Bank of New York.

"Capturing clients' responses in such as way that STP is achieved can be challenging as a result of the variety of options that can be presented to clients across all the corporate action types," Clare adds.
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Clare on the other hand, believes Europe suffers problems that the US has less of an issue with, particularly in the management of deal restrictions.This is where companies cite restrictions on whether certain types of investor are able to participate in a corporate action."This causes issues with respect to interpretation and the fact that STP is difficult to achieve," she explains.She also believes that Europe is facing far more direct challenges in the corporate actions space as a result of wider structural change in the market.

"The European securities market is undergoing major structural change; there are significant plans for the consolidation of CSD platforms.Of direct impact is the effort by European market participants to harmonise corporate action processing as mandated by the European Commission, and as part of the effort to eliminate the so-called Giovannini barriers," she explains.To this end, Clare highlights the plans of the Euroclear group, the Nordic CSDs, and of the European Central Bank to create a single settlement platform for all settlement in euro, all of which will be beneficial to the market in the long term.

There are therefore three important corporate action initiatives underway in Europe, according to Clare.
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"The work of the Euroclear Group has been of a very high quality, and has strongly influenced the work of the ECSDA and ECSA groups in tackling Giovannini Barrier 3," says Clare.
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Clare believes that European CSDs may well be able to learn from the experience of the DTC in the implementation of ISO 15022 messaging.
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However, Clare concedes that the US can also learn from European efforts in some areas: "During the last few years, there has been an enormous intellectual effort to analyse national differences in corporate action processing across different EU countries, and to distil best practices.