Season´s Greetings from Euroclear Sweden

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you all for the trust you place in us, and the business partnerships we have. With this short note I would also like to extend my well-wishes to you and your families for the upcoming holiday season and wish you the very best for 2022.

We have had an exciting year at Euroclear Sweden, welcoming a record number of new clients. We also saw a new service launch and celebrated 50 years as the Swedish CSD. We are proud to now serve more than 2000 companies, by providing the framework for the safe and efficient handling of financial securities in Sweden.

The number of new issuers and the level of transaction volumes have been exceptional. Many have taken the opportunity of the financial environment to list and refinance themselves through a range of means. We are there to facilitate and secure the integrity of also these newly issued securities.

We continue to develop our business and service offerings. Our latest service launch is ‘Vantage by Euroclear’ - which provides listed companies with in-depth insights into their shareholder base. The service provides for example investor relations professionals with structured data on their company's shareholder structure and share movements. We have developed the service together with you, our clients, and are happy that it has been so well received.

Our focus on market harmonisation has intensified during the year and all the more so with Riksbanken’s directional decision to migrate the SEK payments and securities settlements to the Eurosystem’s T2 and TARGET2-Securities (T2S). To help chart the path forward for the market we sponsored a market wide study around this topic done by Oliver Wyman. Our hope is that this study provides an independent and enriching impetus to the market harmonisation initiatives, which in turn are required for an efficient aligning of the market with the Eurozone and ahead of a possible settlement migration to T2S. The study will soon be published on the Euroclear Sweden website.

In line with the new market regulations that apply from February 1, 2022 we have launched a new settlement fails penalties solution. This complements the earlier deployment of the ‘Prevent Settlement Fails’ features, such as partial settlement and concludes a successful CSDR implementation journey. The new penalty regime is an important change from several perspectives, as the penalties will no longer be channelled through the CSDs, but flow directly from the failing party to the non-failing party. With this we fulfil all regulatory requirements to help reduce settlement fails and furthermore we continue to look at additional developments to support settlement efficiency in the Swedish market, such as extending the last settlement batch of the day to give participants additional time to process their transactions.