Citi Publishes First Ever XBRL Dividend Message Over DTCC

Corporate actions, events that occur in the life of a public company, range from dividend announcements to complex mergers to stock splits, and typically require action on the part of an investor.  Corporate actions announcements are delivered to shareholders through SEC filings and news releases through numerous intermediaries.  Industry wide, many segments of today’s process are manual and redundant, resulting in a lack of timeliness, the possibility of errors and substantial costs.

“This is a significant milestone in demonstrating how corporate actions processing can benefit from a technology innovation like structured data,” said Alan Smith, Managing Director, Citi Securities and Fund Services (SFS), “We’re pleased that Citi has taken a key role in an initiative that ultimately will result in better, faster and much less expensive data for the marketplace.”

Since October, Citi has also been distributing the XBRL-formatted dividend announcements via secure FTP to GlobeTax, also a member of the ADR pilot and Citi’s appointed agent for tax relief and reclaim services for the ADRs it issues.  The next step in the pilot program is to expand the program into other types of corporate actions announcements and into announcements by US-based public company issuers.

“DTCC receives thousands of announcements from issuers and intermediaries every day,” said Dan Thieke, DTCC Managing Director, Asset Services, “XBRL enables us to take that information directly into our systems without manual intervention, thereby reducing risk and cost and  boosting efficiency and accuracy.”

To review the XBRL Corporate Actions Taxonomy, go to http://xbrl.us/taxonomies/Pages/2012corpactions.aspx

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