Wading Through the Paper Crisis
In the late 1960s, Wall Street had a paper problem. From 1967-1968, average daily trading volumes doubled from 10 million to 20 million shares. This boom buried workers under a mountain of paper orders and stock certificates.
The solution was to immobilize and dematerialize paper securities – to pool them in a single location, then replace them with book-entry securities. These moves – which DTCC spearheaded – eliminated the majority of physical certificates in the U.S. and began the process of ending the issuance of new ones, helping to lower costs, mitigate risk and increase efficiencies, for the market and individual shareholders.