Euroclear Bank is to significantly improve its operational service levels for clients located in the Asia-Pacific region, the firm announced Tuesday. The service improvements, centred in Euroclear Bank’s Hong Kong office, will also benefit clients around the world that settle and hold Asia-Pacific securities at Euroclear Bank, says the firm. Furthermore, Euroclear Bank will open a representative office in Beijing.
Euroclear Bank will employ more than 25 new operations professionals in Hong Kong to work with Asia-Pacific clients in their own time zones and languages. Several senior-level operations and legal experts will also be transferred from the company’s Brussels-based headquarters to Hong Kong.
As a result, clients with questions or issues relating to, for example, their settlement, corporate action, income and money transfer activities will be managed from Hong Kong by local Euroclear operations experts.
The firm aims to improve both the quality of information communicated and its response rate in replying to client inquiries by making the necessary people and information available throughout Asia-Pacific region business hours. Clients in the region will no longer need to rely on operations experts in the Brussels headquarters for this information, six-to-eight hours later due to time-zone differences.
In order to achieve these upgrades, regulatory approvals are underway to obtain a banking license from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to convert the Euroclear Bank representative office in Hong Kong to a branch office of Euroclear Bank. Pending receipt of this approval, it is expected that these new arrangements will be launched in April.
Philippe Dirckx, director and head of the Asia-Pacific region at Euroclear Bank, explains: "This reorganisation of operational services in Hong Kong underscores Euroclear’s uninterrupted commitment to, and belief in, the continued growth of business opportunities in Asia-Pacific." Yves Poullet, CEO of Euroclear Bank, adds: “The improvements we are making in Asia will not only benefit local clients. Our ability to more quickly and efficiently gather and report business-critical information on Asian securities, particularly in the areas of income, corporate actions and new issues, will enable Euroclear Bank to establish new benchmarks in cross-border, post-trade service quality for Asia-Pacific securities transactions.”