DTCC And SWIFT To Collaborate On Global Message Standards For AIP Market
Mark Lancaster, Vice President, DTCC Wealth Management Services
DTCC and SWIFT have begun an initiative to expand options for communicating with DTCC’s new Alternative Investment Products (AIP) suite of services. This collaboration on global message standards will give market participants the enhanced ability to connect to the AIP service suite using ISO 20022-compliant XML messages and the SWIFT network. This is in addition to the proprietary message formats and direct link to DTCC that is currently available today.
“Building formats and messages in collaboration with SWIFT eases customer implementation of AIP, and addresses the market demand for building messaging interfaces only once,” said Mark Lancaster, vice president, DTCC Wealth Management Services. “Feedback from our joint DTCC-SWIFT working group was very clear on this point: greater interoperability between global participant organizations and industry utilities benefits everyone who’s active in the alternative investment space.”
The announcement that the organizations are working together on standards for alternative investments has been welcomed by the hedge fund industry. Speaking at a meeting jointly hosted by DTCC and SWIFT in Dublin in May, Gary Palmer, CEO of the Irish Funds Industry Association, said, “I am delighted that organizations such as DTCC and SWIFT have come together to work towards the common good, to improve processing efficiency globally for hedge funds.”
This collaboration between DTCC and SWIFT to develop messages for processing alternative investments is just one of a number of initiatives on which the two entities are working jointly to meet the industry’s requirement for greater harmonization of trade processing globally. 