By Steve Letzler

Steve Jennett, head of Operations at Abbey Financial Markets

Abbey Financial Markets has chosen DTCC's Global Corporate Action Validation Service (GCA VS) to automate, streamline and reduce risk for corporate actions. Abbey Financial Markets is the latest customer to join a growing international group of customers that have selected GCA VS to provide global corporate actions data.

For the front and back offices
The GCA VS provides a centralized source of corporate action announcements for equities and fixed-income instruments traded in more than 160 countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. It provides the broadest corporate actions coverage of any service in the world.

"We believe DTCC has the infrastructure and resources in place globally to support the industry's move to a single, standardized source," said Steve Jennett, head of Operations at Abbey Financial Markets. "With GCA VS, we'll be able to ensure the consistency and quality of corporate action information used across our organization. Timely corporate action information is essential in our front office to identify trading opportunities, and in the back office to drive client notifications, while helping to mitigate some of the processing risk for corporate actions."

Abbey Financial Markets went live with the ISO 15022 version of the service. The ISO 15022 international messaging standard, which is used by many firms internationally, is offered in addition to a proprietary format of GCA VS and a real-time Web browser.

Meeting global requirements
"DTCC is committed to delivering a world-class solution for corporate action announcement information. We're delighted to have been selected as Abbey Financial Markets' global provider," said James Femia, DTCC managing director and head of the Global Corporate Action business. "We're investing substantial resources to ensure GCA VS is delivering comprehensive, accurate and timely information that meets the global requirements of our customers."

Abbey Financial Markets joins a growing number of major global financial institutions and buy-side firms using the GCA VS, including Credit Suisse First Boston, JPMorgan Securities, Merrill Lynch, Raymond James, First Clearing and UBS. @