The CEO of Euroclear’s ESES central securities depositories has said she is pleased they delayed the transition to T2S last year, following the successful migration this week.
The CSD’s operations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands have now all migrated over to the pan-European settlement system, following a delay from the initial date in March 2016.
Chief executive officer, Brigitte Daurelle, and her team worked across the weekend with clients, the European Central Bank and the other CSDs involved to go live with T2S, with the ‘point of no return’ taking place Sunday morning. She explained that she is pleased Euroclear made the decision to delay it’s migration considering the systemic importance of the project.
“It happened exactly the way we had planned it, with each point of the migration we were in control,” Daurelle told Global Custodian. “The touch points with the ECB and CSDs were also well mastered, controlled and very professional.”
Euroclear reported that 343,898 balances and 122,519 pending instructions received from its clients were successfully migrated to the T2S platform. Daurelle added that communication was key in the process saying that over 25 conference calls were made with clients to ensure a smooth transition.
The next stage of the process for Euroclear is to now ensure the environment is stable and continue to interact with the ECB, other CSDs and its clients.
“Production wise everything needs to go smoothly and absorb volumes while remaining stable,” said Daurelle.
“We need to make sure the client base can really benefit from new opportunities from T2S now, in cross-border trading and liquidity management. I would bet that it would take a bit of time though as you have to make sure everyone is migrated, and clients need to change their setup.
Global Custodian reported last week that some industry participants believed this was the ‘defining moment’ on the T2S migration, with 25% of market volumes transitioning in this migration.
The biggest wave however, will be in February 2017 where Clearstream goes live. Euroclear Finland will also join T2S as part of the final wave scheduled for 18 September 2017.