Taiwan and U.S. Settlement Institutions Deepen Cooperation to Enhance Cross-Border Custody, Settlement Safety, and Corporate Actions Services

In response to the continuous growth of individual investments in U.S. securities and the U.S. market's accelerated push toward extended trading hours, the Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC) recently held discussions with the U.S. Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) on topics including 24-hour, five-day-a-week settlement services for U.S. stocks, settlement security, and corporate actions.

Led by TDCC Chairman Lin Bing-Huei, a delegation including major domestic foreign委托 brokerage firms such as Fubon Securities and Yuanta Securities visited DTCC and exchanged views with CEO Mr. Frank La Salla and teams responsible for asset services and digital assets.

Lin Bing-Huei stated that operational changes in U.S. market systems and back-end infrastructure are closely linked to Taiwan’s foreign委托 market. With U.S. stock trading hours now extended to 23 hours per day and the implementation of T+1 settlement, post-trade reconciliation, fund allocation, daily accounting closure, and corporate actions affecting next-day trading have seen significantly reduced processing windows. This visit to NYSE, Nasdaq, and DTCC enabled the team to obtain first-hand information on the latest developments in U.S. market infrastructure, further enhancing the efficiency of foreign委托 custody and settlement operations.

DTCC announced that since June 28 of this year, it has extended its settlement and delivery services to operate 24 hours a day, five days a week, allowing overnight trades executed during Asian time zones to be incorporated into central counterparty (CCP) clearing more quickly. By capturing trades earlier, expanding netting opportunities, and introducing central counterparty protection, DTCC aims to reduce counterparty risk and enhance transparency and market resilience for overnight trading.

However, while U.S. exchanges are moving toward a 23/5 trading model and DTCC’s settlement services have entered a 24/5 framework, securities and cash settlement still follow the T+1 cycle and existing cutoff times. For Taiwanese foreign委托 brokers, it is essential not only to confirm front-end order placement capabilities but also to understand upstream U.S. broker-dealers’ trade date rollover procedures, late-trading handling, settlement file formats, and exception management protocols.

Lin emphasized that the true key to extended trading lies not just in expanding investor access but in ensuring secure and seamless post-trade settlement, delivery, custody, and accounting processes. TDCC will continue working with domestic brokers and overseas custodian banks to review and optimize related procedures, ensuring that as market service hours extend, settlement safety and investor rights are simultaneously enhanced.

Corporate actions represent one of the most complex and time-zone-sensitive operations in cross-border securities services. Events such as stock splits, reverse splits, mergers, share exchanges, dividends, and bankruptcy reorganizations often involve multiple conditions and different effective dates. If event ratios, security codes, or entitlement details are confirmed late, it compresses the time available for domestic brokers to notify investors and make account adjustments.

During the meeting, DTCC explained that it is currently promoting issuer announcement digitization—planning for issuers to submit corporate action data through standardized channels, converting existing PDF documents and free-text content into machine-readable structured fields. This initiative aims to reduce redundant interpretation and repeated verification by market institutions, shorten data processing time, and enable most corporate action events to be made available to the market within hours of receipt.

Lin stated that TDCC plans to deepen cooperation with DTCC by directly accessing DTCC’s corporate action data—not merely to improve individual institution workflows, but to transform U.S. market settlement, delivery, and data service capabilities into shared infrastructure for the entire Taiwanese foreign委托 market.

For foreign委托 brokers, having TDCC centrally interface and standardize DTCC data enables consistent event codes, notification formats, operational deadlines, and version control mechanisms. This reduces manual verification and duplicate work, lowers system development costs and operational risks, and ensures all brokers can access market infrastructure services of uniform quality.

Lin emphasized that TDCC will continue deepening collaboration with DTCC, global custodian banks, and domestic foreign委托 brokers, focusing on safety, efficiency, and investor rights to continuously strengthen cross-border custody and post-trade services. This ensures that domestic investors participating in international markets not only gain access to more diverse trading opportunities but also enjoy more timely, stable, and internationally aligned securities services.