VP Securities (VP) is a Copenhagen-based central securities depository that offers local knowledge of the Nordics, together with cross-border securities transactions and services that match the new European environment. The range of services offered by VP concerns the secure issuance, clearing & settlement and safekeeping of securities, to facilitate the requirements of the financial industry.

                          ”We have used Xact in many areas of our projects.
                            The consultants from Xact are very versatile,
                            have expert skills and work with great professionalism.
                            We can only express our satisfaction with the cooperation with Xact.”

Due to changing market conditions, during the last many years VP has undergone a major transformation. From a private independent institution in the 1980s and 1990s, with a total monopoly on the Danish securities market, to a limited liability company in the 2000s.

An important opportunity for VP emerged in the second half of the 2000s, when the ECB (the European Central Bank) started the TARGET2-Securities project (T2S). This is a platform on which investors buy and sell securities across borders within Europe. VP decided to join the project, and in September 2016, VP went live on T2S with securities settlement in EUR. Later, in October 2018, securities settlement in DKK was added.

The communication format to and from T2S is ISO20022, while the communication format between VP and their customers was either ISO15022 or proprietary. There was a wish that VP should also be able to support the ISO20022 format in customer communication, so a sub-project to the T2S-project at VP was created.

Xact made a major contribution throughout the T2S project. Xact consultants contributed to the analysis and design phase, in which the system architecture was determined. Xact also helped prepare detailed code specs to support developers in implementing reusable modules’ functionality.

Early in the project, VP decided to run review processes for all artefacts (documents, specs, code changes, etc.), to ensure high-quality deliverables. Reviews should take both functional and technical aspects into consideration. Besides being the executing party in the process, Xact contributed to defining the rules for reviews.

During the development phase, the project was manned up with multiple new consultants, who were not familiar with the development environment, the VP standards, or the programming language.

Xact was responsible for training the new personnel via classroom teaching, as well as a mentor course. This helped the developers learn quickly and, with great credit to the review process, a high level of uniformity and quality was ensured.

The T2S project went live – on time – in October 2018, including the ISO20022 format for the communication between VP and their customers.

”We have used Xact in many areas of our projects. The consultants from Xact are very versatile, have expert skills and work with great professionalism. We can only express our satisfaction with the cooperation with Xact.”