Welcome to DTCC’s Medium Page
We’re excited that you stopped by. In the coming days and weeks, you’ll find articles here from our experts on all things fintech. What will make our viewpoints original and provocative is that we’ll share views from the perspective of a financial market infrastructure.
For those of you unfamiliar with DTCC or the world of post-trade processing, our digital journey began more than 45 years when we helped the financial markets dig out from mountains of paper by creating the first digitized securities — transforming paper certificates into digital and centralizing them in our depository. Ever since, we’ve continued to automate many other functions across asset classes and instruments. And with each innovation, we’ve enabled markets to grow while mitigating risk, enhancing efficiencies and lowering costs for market participants.
As the centralized market infrastructure serving the U.S. capital markets, DTCC is the clearinghouse — or central counterparty (CCP) — that provides clearing, settlement and information services for virtually all U.S. transactions in equities, corporate and municipal bonds, U.S. government securities and mortgage-backed securities and money market instruments, mutual funds and annuities. We know this may sound a bit technical and arcane, so the most important point to keep in mind is that we make sure all trades are completed, even if one or both parties default, and that buyers always receive their securities and sellers always get paid. That certainty provides stability to the financial markets, and gives the public the confidence to continue investing.
Last year, we settled $2.15 quadrillion in securities transactions. (If you’re wondering, that’s a “2” followed by 15 digits). We also operate the world’s largest central securities depository, holding and servicing securities issues from 170 countries and territories valued at $63 trillion. And our Global Trade Repository service processes more than 14 billion messages annually for the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market.
As you can imagine, it takes a lot of technology to accomplish all this. Today, we’re continuing to pioneer the next generation of fintech, experimenting with and discovering how distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics process automation and cloud computing can shape the future of financial market structure.
When you visit this page, or stop by our website at dtcc.com, you’ll have the chance to read and hear the latest commentary about fintech from the people who are leading change. We hope you return often, share our content with your colleagues and friends and give us feedback. We look forward to getting to know you better and exchanging ideas on the future of technology. We’ll see you again real soon.
