The National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia's central securities depository (CSD), has successfully passed its annual certification by the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation (GLEIF) and affirmed its status as a local operating unit (LOU).
This marks NSD as the first and the only CSD with LOU status in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries.
An entity with LOU status is authorised to assign legal entity identifiers (LEIs) to market participants and to verify LEIs every year.
It also can accept for servicing market participants’ LEIs transferred from other LOUs, and transmit data on the codes to the global LEI database supported by GLEIF, NSD explains.
LEIs are a requirement under several regulatory frameworks including the European Market Infrastructure Regulation for over-the-counter derivatives and the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation, which will require firms to report securities financing transactions from July.
NSD provides services in 30 jurisdictions which, in addition to the Russian Federation, include countries of the CIS, Western and Eastern Europe, and other countries. Market participants can now apply to NSD for LEI assignment and servicing.
The central securities depository says it continues to expand the list of serviced jurisdictions based on client requests. In 2019, it assigned 83 new LEIs and verified 530 LEIs.
Responding to CIS clients' needs, in 2019, NSD developed an approach to assign and further service LEIs via the registering agent licensed by GLEIF and operating in the client’s country.
NSD notes that working via the registering agent will facilitate and accelerate foreign participants’ access the services designed to assign and verify LEIs.
NSD’s activities as the numbering agency and LOU contribute to the introduction of international codification standards in the Russian market and CIS country markets.
The standards aim to increase market transparency, enhance integration into the global market infrastructure, and facilitate and optimise financial market transactions.
Elsewhere, it also recently gained the status of a Service Bureau of the Financial Messaging System of the Bank of Russia (SPFS).
NSD’s aims to develop a single convenient and safe application, a messaging hub, that supports different remote channels such as SPFS, SWIFT, and Transit.
