Exchange Data International and CounterpartyLink Announce Integration

Exchange Data International and CounterpartyLink join forces to enchance the EDI's corporate actions and reference data with CPL's legal entity data.

London, April 5th 2006, Exchange Data International (EDI) and CounterpartyLinkTM have joined forces to provide an integrated data service, designed to save financial institutions time and money and help them comply with anti-money laundering (AML) and know your customer (KYC) regulations. Under the agreement, clients will be able to receive EDI's premier corporate actions and reference data linked to and supplemented by legal entity data provided by CounterpartyLink.

Financial institutions need accurate, consistent and complete reference data so they can increase efficiency through straight-through processing and shorten the settlement cycle.
They also must have quick access to corporate actions announcements that can affect securities holdings. To this end, institutions worldwide depend on high-quality international securities administration reference data from EDI.

But EDI’s reference data becomes even more powerful when combined with CounterpartyLink’s legal entity data service. CounterpartyLink provides clients with cleansed, auditable and continuously-updated legal entity reference data from corporations, funds and fund managers, financial institutions and governments.
CounterpartyLink centres located in the US, China, Romania, Egypt and India collect the data from public primary or secondary sources such as company registry authorities, regulatory organisations and stock exchanges. Then it is verified and maintained using rigorous, documented processes and procedures that comply with current regulations.

Issuer and complex legal hierarchy data are monitored continuously for corporate actions and other changes that might have an impact on investors’ portfolios. The names of the parents and subsidiaries, as well as the ownership classification of the entities, are also included in the data set.

"With this agreement, EDI’s corporate actions and reference data can now be supplemented with linked access to a data source designed to lessen the burden of collecting and maintaining legal entity data," said Jonathan Bloch, Managing Director of EDI. "We view this as a great advantage and a significant new service that will help our clients in their compliance and data management efforts."

James Redfern, Head of Distributor Relations at CounterpartyLink, added: "Integrating EDI’s reference data service with CounterpartyLink’s legal entity data service makes sense and is a distinct advantage for both companies’ clients. We look forward to working with EDI to deliver a powerful solution to financial institutions worldwide."