The settlement failure penalties scheduled for 1 February 2021 ought to be postponed another year. This is the message from the European Central Securities Depositories Association in a letter to the EU Commission’s director general for the issue.
“In this letter, we aim to alert you about a set of new elements which affect the settlement discipline regime timeline and might not yet have been considered by the Commission,” ECSDA writes in the five-page letter.
The association paints the picture of an industry which, under the effects of the covid-19 epidemic, has needed to re-focus on security and other aspects of the day-to-day running of the business, leaving less resources than normally for change initiatives. On top of this, the delivery capacity of IT services has suffered, and moving timetables introduce uncertainty into plans.
As the five currently most important milesotnes and projects in EU post trade, ECSDA lists …
- 1. The reviewed Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD II) in September 2020,
- 2. testing for T2-T2S consolidation as of December 2020,
- 3. the Settlement Discipline Regime in February 2021,
- 4. the launch of T2-T2S consolidation in November 2021, and
- 5. the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) testing, November 2021.
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