The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier post-trade infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced that Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank (U.S.A.) Limited (SuMi TRUST USA) has become the first Japanese global custodian to go live on the ALERT Global Custodian Direct (GC Direct) workflow. With GC Direct, SuMi TRUST USA can maintain and provide standing settlement instruction (SSI) data to its clients through ALERT, the industry’s largest and most compliant online global database for the maintenance and communication of account information and SSIs.

“SuMi TRUST USA is enthusiastic about being the first Japanese global custodian utilizing GC Direct,” said Douglas Shivers, Head of Global Custody Administration at SuMi TRUST USA. “We pride ourselves on client focus and strive for ways to help our clients improve their operational efficiency while reducing risk. By introducing GC Direct, SuMi TRUST USA is pleased to enhance both the information-provision and services that contribute to our clients’ investment activities and operations.”

Bill Meenaghan, Executive Director of DTCC ALERT, said, “We are very happy to have SuMi TRUST USA live on ALERT GC Direct. We’ve had much success with other global custodians in the past few years in enabling greater control in the settlement process, increasing data quality and staying aligned with best practices. We look forward to delivering the same benefits to SuMi TRUST USA.”

ALERT is an integral part of DTCC’s Institutional Trade Processing product suite andenables a global community of investment managers, brokers/dealers and custodian banks to share accurate account and SSI information automatically worldwide. With GC Direct, custodian banks can electronically manage settlement instructions on behalf of their buy-side clients which has resulted in a significant reduction in SSIrelated fails across custodian bank users, with some custodians achieving reductions in fails by over 50%.