Our department has 6 skilled employees with broad experience from the securities industry and as such, our hearts beat for smooth and seamless settlements every day.
Anne Ekeren Bjone is heading the department and has extensive experience from the market, also as a stockbroker. Marianne Klingen and May Rostrup have the responsibility for a faultless operation of the VPO system. With experience from their respective previous positions at Nordea Securities Services and the ABG Sundal Collier Settlement Department, they are in complete control of what is required to secure straight through settlements. Joan Jensen and Even Flugstad are working with ISO 15022 messages, and their focus is also on development of future ISO 20022 messages. They have both many years’ experience from infrastructure, systems and standardization of messages.
Morten Nordby is the strategist and his main focal points are T2S and other future prospects. With his long experience within business and system development at VPS, he is well positioned to recognize VPS’s future demands.
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| Anne | Morten | Marianne | May | Joan | Even | |||||
We have different kinds of customers who all have slightly different needs:
- Investment firms, banks and CCPs are either direct or indirect participants of the settlement system
- Liquidity banks
- Norges Bank (the Central Bank)
In order to offer competitive pricing and keep the risk at a low level, we are always focusing on automated and standardized solutions. “Standard” is therefore very important, also when comparing ourselves to other countries. VPO, the settlement system, operates according to international standards applicable to other similar systems throughout Europe.
Today, VPO carries out two settlements per day. With our standardized and automated solutions, the daily settlements have not experienced any delays during the last 2½ years. In addition to the standardization and automation of our systems, we credit our customers for enabling us to achieve this high success rate.
Mandatory clearing of cash equities traded on Oslo Børs (the Stock Exchange) was introduced in the spring of 2010. This resulted in a new transaction flow and netting of transactions before they reached VPS and VPO. Overnight, we experienced a substantial drop in the number of settlement transactions delivered to our systems. The accumulated value of the settlement transactions, however, has remained at a high level. On average, the value of the two settlements carried out per day is between NOK 110 and 130 billion.
In the autumn of 2014 the Norwegian market changed the settlement cycle from T + 3 to T + 2. Consequently, securities are now available on the VPS account 2 days (instead of 3 days) after the trade has taken place. The transition was handled without error or delay, and we maintained the settlement ratio during the transitional period.
We see that the future offers many exciting challenges. In addition to a new core system, we are preparing for the implementation of CSDR (new regulation for CSDs) in Norway and that the Norwegian market will adapt to new technical standards and market practices. The new CSDR regulation requires i.a. that VPS will have to operate under a new license. RTGS may become a reality in Norway in a few years, probably at the same time as T2S is introduced. Notwithstanding these challenges, we at VPS Settlement and Clearing will keep up the good work, says Anne Ekeren Bjone.
Settled transactions:
