Accelerated Settlement Taskforce, Technical Group Draft Recommendations Report & Consultation can be read here.

Executive Summary

Dear fellow market participant

At the many T+1 related events I have attended in the past year or so, there are two things I get asked for most of all and these are clarity and certainty around the transition to T+1:

• What do I need to do to prepare for T+1?

• When do I need to do it by?

You can help sharpen the clarity of ‘what’ we will need to do by reviewing the draft operational recommendations in this report. The final version of these recommendations, to come at the end of the year, will add certainty to the ‘when’ by finalising an implementation date and a schedule of work covering the period of transition to T+1 with tasks being identified for completion in 2025, 2026 or by the time of implementation in 2027.

The recommendations made are:

1. Recommendation Zero – This is the scope of instruments that will be covered by the implementation of T+1.

There are 2 scenarios:

a. The UK migrates ahead of the European Union/Switzerland. In this scenario, some instruments such as ETPs and Eurobonds will be exempted pending a subsequent transition to T+1 of the European Union and/or Switzerland

b. The UK, European Union and Switzerland migrate to T+1 together. Here, it is a straight transfer of all instruments covered today by CSDR.

The remaining recommendations have been categorised as ‘Principal’ or ‘Additional’:

2. 43 Principal recommendations – These cover the critical post-trade activities you must be able to complete efficiently if the UK’s transition to T+1 and your contribution to that is to be successful. They cover the areas of success criteria, settlement, FMIs, static data, corporate actions, securities financing and FX. It is here you will recognise the importance of automation. As firms in the US who have not automated seem now to be realising, the legacy of not automating is increased headcount costs to deal with manual processes and the higher levels of exception management that result from manual processing

3. 14 Additional recommendations – These look at environmental issues that need to be addressed if the UK is to maximise the efficiency gains that T+1 can deliver but they are not essential to the successful implementation of T+1. If you believe there are recommendations here that would be better identified as Principal recommendations, or vice versa, use the consultation to let me know.

These recommendations have been crafted in 8 months of hard work by 450+ of our peers from more than 110 different firms operating in the UK market today.

Please review them and comment back to me by the end of October.

In its final iteration, the final recommendations will become a TGT Posttrade Code of Conduct to which I hope all firms will subscribe.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Andrew Douglas

Chair TGT

Full Accelerated Settlement Taskforce, Technical Group Draft Recommendations Report & Consultation can be read here.

Source: Accelerated Settlement Taskforce