Euroclear Bank is to significantly improve its operational service levels for clients located in the Asia-Pacific region. 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. Furthermore, Euroclear Bank will open a representative office in Beijing.

Euroclear Bank will enrich both its service quality in the region and operational excellence in Asian securities transactions by employing 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. Both the quality of information communicated and the response rate in replying to client inquiries will improve substantially since the necessary people and information will be 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.

The Euroclear Bank representative office in Beijing is expected to open in April, pending completion of all regulatory matters, with four full-time employees and headed by Tracy Chen, who joined Euroclear Bank in Hong Kong more than one year ago from Royal Bank of Canada in Beijing. The office will support Euroclear Bank clients in China.

Euroclear is the world’s largest provider of domestic and cross-border settlement and related services for bond, equity, derivatives and fund transactions. It serves clients from more than 80 countries including 14 from the Asia-Pacific region. Domestic securities from eight Asia-Pacific markets are currently eligible for settlement, custody and related services at Euroclear Bank. Euroclear Bank offers settlement and money transfer services in 37 currencies, of which nine are currencies of the Asia-Pacific region. (Euroclear Bank)