Digitization Working Group

Purpose

This Working Group’s primary objective is to focus on the ISSA participants’ digitalization and digitization journey to understand the challenges and opportunities to promote digital standardization, share best practices and enhance efficiency, risk reduction and an improved investor experience within the industry.

Scope

This Working Group looks at the digitalization of processes as opposed to specific digitization of securities or currencies. Areas of focus are topics which would benefit from best practice and industry standardization and also interoperability between participants.

The current in scope topics are:

• Account opening and KYC
• Tax documentation, at source or reclaimed
• Corporate Actions & Proxy Voting – Achieving adoption of machine
• Manual processes that include hard copy documents & wet signatures
• API’s  – Development of standardized industry APIs in support of the digitization agenda (covered in Asset Servicing WG)
• DLT standards and market adoption (covered in Working Group Distributed Ledger Technology)
• ACTIVE TOPIC: Private Markets as demand for investments in this sector is increasing, there is a need to review and enhance the front to back processes and provide better investor outcomes and transparency.

Private Markets

Changing investor behaviour has increased demand for Private Equity and alternative investments – but the process of settlement and registration remains inefficient. In the present phase the Working Group is collating a number of projects or service offerings to see if solutions have a common set of attributes and whether these can form a baseline for best practices. From this the WG aims to review the current challenges and propose an institutional solution for the market incorporating ISSA standards, controls, best practices and new disruptive technologies.

Key Deliverables

Private Markets

• Establishment of baseline solution flows
• Define solutions and best practices based on the findings, promote industry adoption and a standard digitization agenda
• Publish a report and recommendations in Q3 2023

Publications

Private Markets – Call to Action (10/2022) > PDF 2.5 MB

Working Group Co-Chairs

• Michael McPolin, Broadridge Financial Solutions
• Ian Pledger, BNY Mellon

Executive Sponsor

• TBC

Instititons Represented by Experts in the Working Group

• Accenture
• Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S.A. (BBVA)
• Broadridge Financial Solution Inc.
• Central Depository Services (India) Limited
• Cognizant
• Datos Insights
• Deutsche Bank AG
• Euroclear
• European Central Securities Depositories Association ECSDA
• GlobeTax Services, Inc.
• Grupo Bolsa Mexicana de Valores
• Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing Limited
• HSBC Holding Plc
• ISSA
• JP Morgan Chase & Co.
• Marsh & McLennan Companies Inc. Oliver Wyman Group
• Myriad Group Technologies Ltd
• Northern Trust Corporation
• NowCM
• S&P Global/IHS Markit
• Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul)
• State Street Corporation
• Strate (Pty) Ltd
• The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation
• The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation
• The Mauritius Commercial Bank Ltd.
• The Standard Bank of South Africa
• U.S. Bank N.A.
• UBS Group AG
• UniCredit S.p.A.