15th T2S harmonisation progress report : harmonisation of European securities settlement

This is the 15th progress report on the harmonisation of European securities settlement published by the Eurosystem's Advisory Group on Market Infrastructures for Securities and Collateral (AMI-SeCo). With the aim of further integrating European financial markets and in line with its mandate, AMI-SeCo has improved harmonisation in the areas of securities settlement and collateral management. This report covers AMI-SeCo's TARGET2-Securities (T2S) harmonisation agenda (covering the T2S markets). This report monitors compliance with T2S harmonisation standards across 26 markets (served by 24 T2S central securities depositories, or CSDs). Little overall progress has been made since the last report on compliance with T2S harmonisation standards, primarily because of the high level of compliance already achieved. AMI-SeCo has agreed to add to the monitoring framework a new harmonisation activity and standard on providing directly connected parties with access to T2S. This will increase transparency and reflect the community's expectation that T2S CSDs will allow their participants to connect directly to T2S if the participants expressly ask to do so. Three markets do not currently comply with this standard. As is the case with the other standards under the framework, they will be invited to share their plans for future compliance. The most problematic area of harmonisation continues to be corporate actions, where a significant number of T2S markets have yet to reach full compliance with the T2S corporate actions standards and with the corporate actions market standards. Nevertheless, further progress has been made in this area, with several markets providing updated details on how they plan to reach full compliance. Overall, in many of the non-compliant markets, the level of compliance with the corporate actions standards has improved further (primarily driven by stakeholders adapting to the standards laid down in the Single Collateral Management Rulebook for Europe, or SCoRE) and is already high, although it still falls slightly short of full compliance. For further details of AMI-SeCo's recent progress in the area of corporate events, see the latest Corporate Events Compliance Report.