When Martine Dinne steps down in June as chief executive officer of
Euroclear Bank after holding the title since 2005, she will have
spent 38 years at the Brussels-based international central
securities depository (ICSD). Dinne was witness to--and had a hand
in--some of the most significant changes in European securities
processing.
 As an operations
executive in what was then the Euroclear division of Morgan
Guaranty Trust Co. of New York--now part of JP Morgan Chase &
Co.--in 1969, Dinne processed settlement instructions for hundreds
of Eurobond transactions in certificated form. Euroclear spun off
from JP Morgan in 1972 (JP Morgan continued as the depository's
operator and banker until 2001), and Eurobonds have since been
immobilized. Euroclear Bank now settles more than EUR200 trillion
($267 trillion) worth of deals in not only Eurobonds, but an array
of European fixed-income, equity and investment-fund
transactions.
As Europe pursues the formation of a single
capital market, the trading, clearing and settlement infrastructure
will change-- those serving it must evolve as well.
Euroclear has attempted, through a series of acquisitions, to
become a one-stop shop for processing cross-border transactions in
Europe. It bought the French domestic depository in 2001, followed
by those of the Netherlands, U.K. and Ireland in 2002, leading some
local European agent banks to complain that Euroclear Bank had an
unfair advantage in cross-border equities. Euroclear countered in
2005 by creating a parent firm, Euroclear SA, as an umbrella
organization for Euroclear Bank and its sister depositories (a
number that has grown to five with the addition last year of
Belgium's CIK). |
