By Steve Letzler

The Global Corporate Action Validation Service (GCA VS) closed out 2006 with a bang, signing six new firms to the service in the last quarter.

New customers include Raymond James & Associates, Inc., and First Clearing LLC (a unit of Wachovia Corporation). They join other global heavyweights such as Merrill Lynch, UBS, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Securities, and bring the total number of GCA VS customers to 21.

On deck
DTCC is working aggressively to further increase GCA VS's customer base and is in the advanced stages of discussions with a number of firms, according to James Femia, DTCC managing director and head of Global Corporate Actions.

"We are seeing growing interest from global banks, as well as investment managers in Europe and the United States, in getting corporate actions announcement information from around the world," Femia said. "More firms are deciding that it makes sense to outsource this job to a trusted expert like DTCC. Our 30-plus years of experience in the field, as well as our global reach and connections, all contribute to the growth of interest in this service."

BRICK work
Femia said much of the expansion in corporate actions announcements is coming from the so-called BRICK countries: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Korea, where corporate actions announcements are growing 50-100% annually.

"There is a huge amount of investment going on in these markets, and it's not always easy to get details about corporate actions in them," he said. "Having an organization with DTCC's resources and contacts to obtain that information can be highly advantageous to firms."

Femia also noted that more investors are investing in countries outside their domestic markets. This means financial services organizations not only have to operate globally, they also have to obtain fast and accurate corporate actions announcement information from a wider range of countries to support this investment activity.

"If firms don't outsource that activity, they may have to add significant staff costs to have their own people gather and track the information," he said. "Since this really isn't a core business for most firms, they are becoming more inclined to outsource it, provided they are comfortable that their provider can give them the information accurately and quickly."

Global and multilingual
GCA VS provides announcement information on corporate actions in more than 160 countries. In 2006, the service, with staff working in 15 languages, issued about 900,000 event announcements on more than 1.6 million securities.

One of the keys to GCA VS's comprehensiveness is that it takes feeds from a number of other service providers and crosschecks the data against appropriate sources, including the issuer when necessary, to provide the best information to customers.

DTCC is also playing key roles in global efforts to standardize corporate actions data at the source and to automate the announcement of that data as much as possible. @

[For additional information about the Global Corporate Action Validation Service, contact Susan Spivey in New York at sspivey@dtcc.com or +1 212.855.4144 or Richard Bustard in London at rbustard@dtcc.com or +44 (0)20.7650.1501.]

GCA Validation Service on the Conference Circuit: DTCC will have speakers, exhibitions or be attending the following upcoming trade conferences. If you plan on attending the conference, be sure to look for DTCC Global Corporate Action Validation Service personnel.

• February 28 SIFMA (Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association) Corporate Actions Division Workshop, New York
• March 6 Securities Operations Forum Corporate Action Workshop, Boston
• March 12-15 FIMA (Financial Information Management) Reference Data Conference, New York
• March 14 Financial Technologies Forum Global Securities Operations Conference, New York
• March 18-21 ISITC (Industry Standardization for Institutional Trade Communication) Industry Forum and Vendor Conference, Boston