Andrew Kouloumbrides of Xceptor discusses the firms SFTR partnership with DTCC
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Can you tell me about the partnership between Xceptor and DTCC?
By coming together, our partnership will help address the logistical problems firms face in preparing for the Securities Financing Transactions Reporting regulation (SFTR), which is set to go live in 2020. Any bank with a branch in Europe or trading in Europe will have to comply with it.
SFTR, which requires counterparts to report securities financing transactions to a trade repository, has very extensive requirements with over 153 fields to be completed. There is a fair amount of concern in the marketplace around the extraction and formatting of that data, and this is the key reason why The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has partnered with Xceptor.
There will be a huge requirement to upload data from different sources and our offering will enable clients to input that data in any format. DTCC will create the evolving rules and analytics of the SFTR regulations that determine the value of the fields so that Xceptor’s intelligent data automation software can capture the data, repair it, enrich it and normalise it before submitting it for reporting. The service also provides a pre-check review for data enrichment and validation that allows firms to make corrections to the data before submitting to a trade repository.
It’s a vast improvement on past working methods. In the past, the client had to provide the data in the format that the reporting entity required. Whereas now, the burden of extracting, transforming and analysing that data sits within the service, making the process less onerous for the client.
How will the platform cope with the influx of data?
The platform is an enterprise-grade platform so it can deal with vast volumes of data flowing through it and, indeed, it does so on a regular basis. Global banks already use it for multiple operations and so there are already vast volumes of data flowing through the platform.
What were the main challenges in implementing this?
One of the key challenges from my experience is that even published regulations continually evolve. There will always be tweaks that need to be made to them. One of the key factors that we are very aware of in this partnership is to make sure that we are closely aligned to the regulatory bodies so that we can forward-plan for these evolutions.
How will DTCC utilise Xceptor’s software to help with SFTR obligations?
The underlying service for SFTR will be the Xceptor platform. Xceptor will be configured to consume the data fed into it by the end clients and transform it according to the rules and analytics created and maintained by the DTCC. The platform itself will be operated by DTCC so it is a true partnership and the start of a relationship that we hope will evolve to mutual benefit.
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