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Euronext Securities Porto is pleased to inform its clients of the forthcoming implementation of the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) and the associated SCoRE standards, in addition to a new Corporate Actions platform.

This implementation will meet clients’ needs for increased compliance with standards and improved efficiency of Corporate Actions processing, modernisation of systems to provide greater flexibility, streamlined delivery and faster time to market, and harmonisation of services for clients across markets.

What is ECMS?

The Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) is a unified system for managing assets used as collateral in Eurosystem credit operations. Its launch is planned by Eurosystem for 16 June 2025, according to the new date announced by ECB.

Financial intermediaries connected to the Eurosystems (e.g., T2S) will be required to connect to ECMS, which will comply with the SCoRE standards.

What is SCoRE?

As part of its mandate to foster European financial markets integration and promote a truly domestic single market in Europe, the Eurosystem’s Advisory Group on Market Infrastructures for Securities and Collateral (AMI-SeCo) is working towards developing a Single Collateral Management Rulebook for Europe (SCoRE).

SCoRE is a set of standards, which defines common rules for managing collateral. The implementation of these standards aims to reduce fragmentation in the European markets, which arises due to the variety of legacy standards, structural constraints and as a result of complex and diverse market practices.

While the AMI-SeCo identified ten areas where harmonisation is needed, the first set of published standards focus on three topics:

1. Triparty Collateral Management

2. Corporate Actions

3. Billing processes

Currently only Corporate Actions and Billing standards are applicable to Euronext Securities Porto.

Euronext Securities Porto adaptation plans for compliance with the SCoRE standards are available here.

Corporate Actions

The latest version of the SCoRE Corporate Actions Standards can be found on the ECB website. The adaptation plan for SCoRE standards give details of the expected impacts on Corporate Actions (CA) compliance and can be found here.

According to the analysis performed of the standards,  Euronext Securities Porto identified many changes that result from their adoption. A non-exhaustive list of the changes has been drawn up for Fixed Income securities and is provided in the table below.

• Implementation of additional Corporate Action event types and events with options.

• Alignment of the cash and securities payments.

• Implementation of reversals.

• Notification in case of delays in execution of a Corporate Action.

• Ensure availability of the default option for the new CA events with options.

• Expansion the use of blocking of securities for the new elective CA events.

• Availability of the full set of the ISO 20022 Corporate Actions messages for clients, complying with standards.

• Enhancement of business processes, workflows and key data with the implementation of ISO 20022 messages.

• Alignment with the standard for securities that follow the “Modified Following business day” convention.

More information about the impacts for the implementation of the SCoRE Corporate Actions Standards for all the other asset classes can be found here.

New Corporate Actions platform

Euronext Securities Porto is taking advantage of the implementation of ECMS and the SCoRE standards to implement a new Corporate Actions platform. This will increase the efficiency and modernize the processing of Corporate Actions, while complying with the new SCoRE standards.

The new Corporate Actions platform is being implemented first for Fixed Income securities. Euronext Securities Porto is live with its defined Minimum Viable Product (MVP) since April 2024. The mentioned MVP has been progressively been enhanced with additional incremental releases, the last of for Fixed Income being completed on 18 November 2024 by anticipation to the implementation of the ECMS platform. Following the migration of Fixed Income securities to the new Corporate Actions platform, the existing legacy platforms will run in parallel to continue providing services for all other asset classes.

The migration to the new Corporate Actions platform for all other asset classes is expected to go-live in production in November 2025. Therefore, the management of Corporate Actions for all other asset classes will migrate to this new platform only a few months after the go-live of the ECMS in Production (planned for 16 June 2025). 

More information about the next phases of the new Corporate Actions platform can be found here.

Key milestones

Hereafter the main future project milestones as they are currently scheduled:

Billing 

The AMI-SeCo validated the content of the SCoRE Billing Standards in June 2021. The final version of the standards can be found on the ECB website.

Euronext Securities Porto expects to comply with the standards for the ECMS deadline.

The adaptation plan for the SCoRE standards includes the expected impacts for Billing compliance and can be found here.

Impacts of compliance with the SCoRE billing standards is expected to have minimal impact for clients. 

Impact on clients and further information

Euronext Securities Porto actively participate in the discussions with the various groups involved in order to ensure compliance with standards and that the associated calendar meets the needs of our customers.