Swiss Tax Authority Names Telekurs Financial As Data Provider For EU Savings Directive Information

Telekurs Financial has enlarged its securities database with the information necessary for EU Directive on the Taxation of Savings Income (EUSD) compliance. This enables U.S. based financial institutions that manage customer accounts in European Union member states to comply with

By None

Telekurs Financial has enlarged its securities database with the information necessary for EU Directive on the Taxation of Savings Income (EUSD) compliance. This enables U.S.-based financial institutions that manage customer accounts in European Union member states to comply with the July 1, 2005 deadline of the EU Directive on the Taxation of Savings Income.

EUSD regulates the taxation of interest payments made across borders to individuals within the EU. It calls for savings income from interest payments made in one member state to be made subject to taxation in accordance with the national laws of the beneficial owner’s member state.

A major challenge to financial institutions is to identify financial instruments subject to taxation in accordance with the EUSD. For global financial institutions with security master or reference databases outside the EU, clarity is even harder to achieve. Early on, Telekurs recognized this as a potential problem and began examining the technical solutions available to users of its Valordata Feed (VDF).

Telekurs has now identified and flagged in its database more than 200,000 instruments that fall within the scope of the EUSD. The benefits to EU members – and other countries with reciprocal agreements with the EU – are clear, as there is now a source of information that solves this complex data issue.

As a result, Telekurs has now been named the official data provider by the Swiss Federal Tax Administration with respect to information relating to the EUSD and its classification of financial instruments.

Barry Raskin, president of Telekurs (USA), said: “The structure of VDF, with its encoded and extensible data model, coupled with that fact that the instruments were already in our database of 2.25 million global securities, means that Telekurs had a big head start on solving this market need. Today, we have the industry’s only comprehensive database of EUSD-affected instruments, and we are confident the Swiss FTA mandate will increase acceptance of our service among private institutions.”

Existing Telekurs VDF customers will be able to access this data via their existing interface. In addition, this EUSD solution will also be available to U.S. financial institutions that are not yet VDF customers.

«