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MSRB Grants Omgeo Approval for Suppression of Paper Confirms for Municipal Bonds
Municipal Bond Confirms Electronically Stored in Omgeo inSITE Compliant with MSRB Rule G-15
Boston/New York – 28 September, 2009 – Omgeo, the global standard for post-trade efficiency, today announced that the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) has issued an interpretive notice regarding Rule G-15, allowing clients to leverage Omgeo inSITE to fulfill their municipal bond confirmation requirements electronically instead of with paper.
MSRB Rule G-15 requires that at or before the completion of a transaction in municipal securities with or for the account of a customer, each broker dealer or municipal securities dealer must give or send to the customer a written confirmation that contains certain disclosures. The interpretive notice (http://www.msrb.org/msrb1/whatsnew/2009-50.asp) now allows such confirmation of the transaction to be provided wholly electronically.
“Since launching Omgeo inSITE late last year, we’ve seen a strong pipeline of clients develop,” said Lee Cutrone, managing director, industry relations at Omgeo. “The industry as a whole has a strong desire to continue to eliminate wasteful paper wherever possible, as it causes tremendous, unnecessary burden and cost for market participants. We are pleased that Omgeo inSITE can now also help clients with their compliance for municipal bond confirmations, in addition to equities and other fixed income instruments.”
To mitigate risk, the legal and compliance groups of most broker/dealers mandate that a separate paper confirm listing broker-specific disclosure information be distributed to counterparties in addition to the electronic confirm. Prior to the availability of Omgeo inSITE, recipients of these supplementary confirm disclosures would often pay a third party to store the paper documents offsite. This practice resulted in an enormous cost to the industry for processing, distributing and storing these documents. With the ability to house this information electronically via Omgeo inSITE, that cost is drastically reduced and the use of paper is eliminated.
Using pre-defined criteria, broker/dealers post their confirm disclosures within Omgeo inSITE, where each set of criteria generates a URL and reference number. Omgeo TradeSuite electronic confirms submitted by subscribing broker/dealers are enriched with the URL and reference number of the confirm disclosure appropriate for that trade. Counterparties can view this information by following the URL and using the unique reference number noted on their enriched electronic confirm. The ability to view confirm disclosures electronically eliminates the need to generate additional paper confirms, resulting in cost savings for both the buy and sell side.
While Omgeo inSITE currently stores confirm disclosures for TradeSuite users, Omgeo continues to explore additional uses for the repository to benefit the global financial community.
About OmgeoSM
Omgeo creates certainty in post-trade operations through the automation and timely confirmation of the economic details of trades executed between investment managers and broker dealers. Every day Omgeo enables an efficient community of more than 6,000 financial services clients in 46 countries to manage matching and exception handling of trade allocations, confirmations, and settlement instructions. Leading organizations rely on Omgeo to help manage an increasingly complex investment industry by providing operational stability and solutions that complement the focus on profitability in an era of escalating trade volumes. Across borders, asset classes, and trade lifecycles, Omgeo is the global standard for operational efficiency across the investment industry. Formed in 2001, Omgeo is jointly owned by the DTCC and Thomson Reuters.
For more information about Omgeo, please visit www.omgeo.com.
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