National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC) and the Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC) have unveiled plans to support an interface to the National Association of Securities Dealers' (NASD) Trace reporting system for the real-time reporting of corporate bond transactions.
The announcement, made by John Fitzgerald, managing director of Fixed Income Clearing Corporation (FICC), was delivered at a Bond Market Association conference in Orlando
"The Trace/RTTM (Real Time Trade Matching) interface will provide a uniform vehicle for members to comply with regulatory reporting requirements for both municipal and corporate bonds," says Fitgerald.
Plans for the real-time reporting of municipal bond trades via the RTTM system were announced last April.
Under the latest proposals, street side trades in corporate bonds will be sent to the RTTM system for matching, and then passed onto NSCC for clearance and settlement. An interface between RTTM and Trace will be used to pass the required street side and customer trade data directly on to NASD for price reporting purposes in real-time.
RTTM for corporate and municipal bonds, as well as Unit Investment Trusts (UITs), will use a common message type that will allow members to submit trades to NSCC for both matching and regulatory reporting to the MSRB and the NASD via a single pipeline. This pipeline would also be used for providing any messages back to members from those regulators.
The decision to support the Trace/RTTM link was reached after the results of two surveys conducted independently by the Securities Industry Association (SIA) and TBMA indicated widespread industry interest in building and maintaining the interface.
NSCC plans to implement RTTM for corporate and municipal bonds in the first quarter of 2004, with the addition of interactive messaging and regulatory interfaces not long after.