BSE to provide corporate info in global standard format

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) has tied up with SWIFT to provide ‘Corporate Actions to Custodians’ in ISO 15022 format, a globally accepted standard for messaging for securities trading. The initiative makes BSE the first securities market infrastructure member of SWIFT in India.

SWIFT is the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a member-owned cooperative that enables more than 9,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 209 countries to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably.

HSBC Securities Services, CITI Global Transaction Services, India; Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered Bank have taken up this service.

Processing corporate actions manually places a heavy drain on resources. Errors during such processing can result in financial losses. The volume of listed companies in India and the number of possible corporate actions make it a challenge for custodians to collect reliable and timely information in this regard.

The initiative will help BSE streamline the process of disseminating authentic data directly to the custodians, leading to quicker announcements at significantly higher reliability and lower costs.

Madhu Kannan, managing director & CEO, BSE, said: “The SWIFT solution will give custodians access to high quality data on corporate actions. There is a lot of interest in the international arena for corporate actions data from India and the potential for this tie-up is quite high.”

SWIFT was glad to concur. “This is a terrific example of the Indian financial community is working together to standardise and automate around a key market infrastructure,” said Arun Tiwari, Head of India and the Sub-continent for SWIFT.