With less than a month remaining before the industry migration to a T+1 settlement cycle, DTCC continues to stress the importance of aligned readiness and communication, particularly for unplanned events.
Related: Know Your T+1 Blind Spots
To advance this initiative, DTCC and a diverse cross-section of clients – buy-side, sell-side and custodians – recently conducted a series of outage scenario exercises, commonly known as tabletops, aimed to assess the impacts of hypothetical outage scenarios in a T+1 settlement environment.
The tabletops were conducted from Q4 2023 through Q1 2024 and tested two different scenarios: an Institutional Trade Processing (ITP) impact from a systems outage, and settlement processing impact due to a systems outage at The Depository Trust Company (DTC).
“The results of the exercises yielded invaluable insights that DTCC and industry participants should incorporate into incident responses,” said Alejandra Glass, Managing Director, Head of Equities Clearing and DTC Settlement Product Management, DTCC. “Above all, the findings reinforced the importance of continued coordination and collaboration across the industry.”
T+1 Tabletop Takeaways:
- Confirm Subscriptions to Incident Notifications on MyDTCC Portal
- Perform a Comprehensive Impact Analysis
- Counterparty Collaboration Will Be Critical
- Ensure Resources are Available for Timely Decisions
- Communicate Issues as Soon as You Can
For more details and links on T+1 readiness, download the Tabletop Takeaways infographic.
Other T+1 Resources
In addition to the takeaways, another insight from the tabletop exercise was the continuous need for T+1 resources. DTCC has developed an extensive library to help clients and the industry prepare for the coming T+1 changes.
- T+1 Conversion Guide: Solidify operational readiness plans for T+1 transition weekend and download this comprehensive guide on the steps DTCC will take during the T+1 conversion process, along with changes that will be effective upon implementation of the T+1 settlement cycle on May 28, 2024.
- Industry Command Center: To ensure a smooth conversion to T+1 settlement on May 28, 2024, the SIFMA T+1 Command Center will provide conversion status information, transparency into the activity of other participants, and serve as a forum for issue identification and socialization. DTCC will provide regular updates during command center meetings, including sharing several data points such affirmation rates, failures and more. Call participation is open only to those designated by their organizations. Calls are closed to press, industry analysts and regulators. Learn more about the SIFMA T+1 Command Center.
For additional resources, visit ust1.org to access a library of content relating to T+1 and stay informed on the latest news regarding the upcoming shortened settlement cycle.