Today, we’re proud to release our 2021 Annual Report to share our story of “Progress” with you. The online, interactive report highlights how DTCC’s ability to deliver value to the industry is built on foundational pillars that include Leadership, Impact, Partnership, Purpose and Financial Performance. These pillars underpin our ability to safeguard the global markets and drive product innovation to create solutions that help address the complex business challenges facing clients.
Below is a short summary of our progress in 2021 across these pillars and the key initiatives we advanced last year:
Progress Through Leadership: We leveraged our role to drive positive change in market structure and operations, while honing our leadership skills to more effectively support our clients, regulators and other stakeholders.
Progress Through Financial Strength: Our ability to drive progress requires our firm to have a strong balance sheet, ample capital reserves and the ability to manage any market event that occurs. We improved our financial standing by creating new business lines to generate revenue independent of market volumes, closely managing expenses, maintaining solid credit ratings, raising new capital, and refinancing debt to benefit from low interest rates.
Progress Through Client Impact: Our clients expect us to drive innovation by enhancing and expanding our solutions to address their top pain points and growing our abilities to serve new markets and asset classes.
- Future Focused Enhancements: Upgraded our infrastructure, introduced additional automation and improved end-to-end asset servicing through the use of innovative technology.
- Serving New Markets: Unveiled plans for our Digital Securities Management (DSM) platform to digitalize and modernize private markets. Similarly, we are using DLT and the cloud to underpin Project Ion – which will allow U.S. clients to settle with a flexible timeframe, including on T+0.
- Industry-wide Impact: Continued to advance open and integrated Institutional Trade Processing (ITP) vision, expanded our API Marketplace, launched new data products, and helped industry comply with Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR).
Progress Through Partnership: Our ability to deliver innovative solutions to meet industry expectations is underpinned by our commitment to collaboration across the financial services ecosystem. This partnership is essential to aligning our strategic priorities with the industry’s top needs. Our partnerships take on many meaningful forms, including:
- Forging a consensus on global derivatives data harmonization and standardization is just one example among many of how we listen, learn and lead.
- Teaming up with the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) to expand the reach of our annual Systemic Risk Barometer survey and provide a more comprehensive picture of the leading risk management trends.
- Exploring market impact and remediation scenarios related to settlement risk with the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk (ARC).
Progress Through Purpose: While we have always sought to make an impact through engagement programs, philanthropy, and volunteerism, we strengthened our efforts with a cohesive strategy for capturing a broader set of actions and metrics. Our first ESG Report illustrates our commitment to making a positive impact by tracking, managing and reporting on issues important to our stakeholders and us.
While we can’t predict what tomorrow will bring, we are confident that we have taken the appropriate steps to position DTCC for success. Our preparation, planning and continued evolution as an organization will enable us to continue driving positive change by focusing on the pillars of leadership, financial strength, client impact, partnership and purpose.