The release, ALERT 5.0, includes the Global Custodian Direct feature, which enables global custodians and prime brokers to electronically maintain timely and accurate SSI data in ALERT, on behalf of their clients. Currently, investment managers perform these updates manually.

By adopting ALERT, global custodians and prime brokers are able to offer their clients the additional service of maintaining and providing SSI data in an automated, secure and efficient manner, helping to reduce their clients’ operational risk and costs. The service facilitates the communication of custodian sourced, SMPG and ALERT compliant SSI data by connecting a custodian's central SSI repository to the ALERT host, using ISO 20022 compliant messaging.

Over recent years, there has been growing demand for global custodians to engage in the maintenance of SSIs on behalf of their clients. To reflect this, several custodians are making significant investments required to rationalize internal SSI repositories and to automate their interfaces with the industry’s SSI Utility - ALERT. State Street is one of five custodians due to go live on the Omgeo ALERT GC Direct service in 2015.

Dick Taggart, a member of the Omgeo Board of Managers and Executive Vice President at State Street, also serving as chairman of DTCC’s SSI Utility Product Governance Committee, said: “By enabling global custodians to access and update ALERT automatically via GC Direct, we add significant efficiency and risk reduction to the industry. SSIs will be more complete and accurate, which helps reduce fail risk, and Omgeo’s establishment of a true SSI Utility under the DTCC umbrella reduces costs and risk for all subscribers and participants.”

The launch of these new capabilities marks a key achievement for DTCC and the industry’s desire to extend ALERT to become the industry’s SSI Utility. Subsequent phases will expand asset class coverage in the service, as well as offer an enhanced API for brokers, asset managers and third party transaction services to retrieve SSI information in real-time during trade processing, reducing the need to maintain disparate databases.

“Asset managers have traditionally maintained SSIs for their accounts, however custodians have always been the source of this data, where each account settles and holds its assets. Omgeo created ALERT to enable asset managers to maintain their SSIs in a central repository for brokers to access, driving value for these segments”, said Bill Meenaghan, Executive Director of ALERT Product Management at Omgeo. “By adding custodians as users of ALERT, we will be able to improve information quality standards, since custodians will automatically be updating their data as they create or change account SSIs. An initial group of five custodians, including State Street, have demonstrated their enthusiasm and commitment to this project by planning to go live with the Omgeo ALERT GC Direct feature in 2015. We expect high participation from the entire custodian bank community to follow shortly.”

Adding to this, Paula Arthus, President and CEO of Omgeo, said: “We are extending the benefits of Omgeo ALERT to the custodian community. Automating the manual processes relating to SSIs will benefit all members of our community by saving them time, increasing security through the creation of audit trails and lowering operational costs. We look forward to continuing to work with the industry to realize the full benefits of the SSI Utility.”