The NSD, which is the country’s central securities depository, delivers service for its clients using both international and domestic message formats: MT, MX, PARTAD (Russian domestic format) and many other domestic formats. Acting as infrastructure agent, NSD provides on-the-fly conversion of message formats as appropriate for particular clients.

NSD is engaged in a multi-year project to modernise the infrastructure of securities processing based on the ISO 20022 standard. It has recently announced world-leading solutions easing the management of Corporate Actions related to AGM and other types.

These ISO 20022 messages meet local market requirements as well as the needs of the international investment community. The 20022 standard implemented is based on the SWIFT MX standards and includes extensions (e.g. to support fractional securities) for use by both domestic and international banks.

Corporate actions messages are among the most complex in the ISO 20022 (and ISO 15022) series, approximating 30,000 conversion rules.

The commitment to delivering support for both 15022 and 20022 (MT and MX) standards for corporate actions in a timely manner needed a special messaging infrastructure.

This is where the NSD turned to Trace Financial and Transformer. The NSD were impressed by the fact that Transformer was already extensively in use by SWIFT and they were more impressed when they trialled Transformer with their business analysts and developers in a successful proof-of-concept exercise.

Transformer was found to offer all the functionality needed by the NSD, as well as complete high quality message definition libraries for the entire range of ISO 15022-based MT and ISO 20022-based MX message standards, along with bi-directional MT-MX mappings.

Sergei Putyatinsky, CIO at the NSD said: “With such a powerful tool in place we’re now thinking of extending our message conversion services to other business areas”.
The fact that Transformer could be used by business analysts was an important factor. The model-based approach of Transformer makes the mappings largely self-documenting and easy to maintain. The fact that Transformer does not require any coding stage eliminates the need for any risky handover between analyst and developer teams, decreases time to market, increases productivity and improves quality.

In addition, testing at unit, system and regression testing levels are an integral part of Transformer, helping to ensure that the mappings have high quality built in from the start.

Vasiliy Mikhailov, Head of Software Development, says: “With Transformer we are sure that our code in every line conforms to our internal message transformation specifications - since the code is literally generated from those specifications, no error is possible”.

John Murphy, Managing Director of Trace Financial, commented: “The NSD is now in a powerful position to maintain and drive their initiative forward knowing this critical area can be addressed so successfully.”