Italy successfully migrated to the Target2Securities platform on 31 August, after it delayed its start date from 22 June.
The central securities depositories (CSDs) of Greece, Romania, Malta and Greece connected to the platform in June, and 16 more countries will join in successive waves between now and 2017.
The Italian CSD, Monte Titoli, delayed joining as complications with the European Central Bank meant it did not have time to properly test the systems in time.
Monte Titoli CEO Mauro Dognini said that overall, the migration was a success. He said: “It was a very big job and a long weekend ahead of go-live on the Monday, but all in all it went very well. It was a joint effort between Monte Titoli and the banks involved; we migrated 60 banks over the weekend, and moved 250,000 positions from the old legacy settlement system to being fully reconciled with T2S.”
Dognini also pointed out that Monte Titoli is the largest CSD joining with the first wave.
“In the first two months of T2S the platform has been processing an average of 2,000 trades a day. Monte Titoli averages about 80,000 trades per day, so it will be a significant change in terms of volumes,” he said.
“This means Monte Titoli will now be processing 97 to 98 percent of all the volumes on the T2S platform and we were happy that the system proved its resilience in its first days and we are confident that it will continue to do so.”
Kashyap Kapasi, director of strategic solutions for investment services at Fiserv, called the development an “exciting stage in the journey towards a more fiscally harmonised Europe and borderless settlement ecosystem”.
He said: “Italy’s inclusion will provide immense value to the global asset management industry that transacts in Italian assets.”
“Italy is the third largest economy in the Eurozone and attracts significant cross border investment flows. T2S helps manage settlement data more efficiently and the new settlement mechanisms will function seamlessly, yielding greater straight through processing.”
