Collateral Management Harmonisation (CMH)

Developing European standards for collateral management.

Collateral Management Harmonisation (CMH) is key for European financial market integration. It is the next step in creating a domestic single market in Europe.

Why is the Eurosystem harmonising collateral management processes?

  • To enhance safe and efficient securities settlements and collateral management.
  • To remove barriers and inefficiencies in a consistent, detailed way.
  • To meet stakeholder demand for financial market integration in Europe.

Benefits

New market standards will lead to:

  • a pan-European rulebook for how financial market infrastructures and their users interact.
  • efficient collateral management
  • business processes based on a common set of data
  • interoperable market infrastructures
  • use of the latest international communication standards (such as ISO 20022).

CMH standards

The following standards have been agreed:

  • Corporate Actions (CA) for debt instruments
  • billing processes

The following topics are under discussion:

  • corporate actions for non-debt instruments
  • taxation processes
  • bilateral collateral management
  • margin calls
  • cut-off times
  • collateral data
  • sourcing of collateral
  • non-euro-denominated collateral

CMH requires the implementation of two frameworks: the Eurosystem Collateral Management System (ECMS) and Single Collateral Management Rulebook for Europe (SCoRE) standards.

What is ECMS?

ECMS is a unified system for managing assets used as collateral in Eurosystem credit operations.

Financial intermediaries connected to Eurosystems (e.g. T2S) will have to connect to ECMS. ECMS must comply with SCoRE standards. 

What is SCoRE?

The Single Collateral Management Rulebook for Europe (SCoRE) is a set of standards, which define common rules for managing collateral.

These standards aim to reduce fragmentation in European markets.

Harmonised corporate actions platform

Euronext is deploying a harmonised platform for Corporate Actions (CA) across CSDs.

We are taking advantage of the ECMS and SCoRE implementations to launch a new CA platform, in line with SCoRE CA standards.

Our CA platform supports efficient, harmonised cross-market processes and automated CA processing.

Implementation

Our new CA platform will go live for fixed income securities in Porto and Copenhagen in line with the ECMS go-live.

CA management for all other asset classes will migrate to the new platform after the go-live of the ECMS.