T-Scape is developing a solution to help wealth managers and other Intermediaries meet one of the regulatory requirements of the Shareholder Rights Directive (SRD) II that comes into effect on 3 September 2020.Working in collaboration with one of Europe’s leading wealth managers, the new application will support the processing requirements of Shareholder Identification Disclosure (SID). Those requirements include the dissemination of SID disclosure requests, interaction with internal systems for shareholder information, user alerting where appropriate and ultimately the creation of disclosure responses. The application will be added to the growing suite of applications being delivered by T-Scape under its iActs brand.
The directives primary aim is to enable closer engagement between a company and its shareholders, strengthening the position of shareholders and ensuring decisions are made for the long-term stability of the company. A new ISO20022 message set has been established specifically for this purpose and will provide the basis upon which new processes are established. iActs will make full use of these. It will also cater for other machine-readable formats that may be used early on.
T-Scape Managing Director David Baxter says: ‘In the short-term we very much expect ISO15022 and other formats to be in play, especially as it may take some time for organisations to transition. iActs already supports numerous message formats and adding new ones is a fairly straightforward exercise. The real key to SID is the speed at which information is processed, how quickly each incoming SID request can be normalised and how quickly a SID disclosure can be produced and delivered to the requesting company. If the recommended 24- hour turnaround outlined in the directive is to be met new automated processes will need to be introduced, hence iActs.’
Post trade groups had called for the new directive to be shelved for 12 months given the impact of Covid-19. The European Commission rejected this however, after a coalition of individual investor organisations led by BETTER FINANCE warned about the risks of any delay. As a result the regulation looks set for implementation in September. Baxter continues, ‘my guess is there was a slowing in preparations for SRD II because of a real expectation that the directive would be deferred for another year. It wasn’t, and as such there’s now a game of catch up in play’.
