BNP Paribas Securities Services has been mandated to provide custody, settlement and liquidity services to four Italian banks: Banco di Credito Popolare, Banca Popolare dell’Alto Adige, Banca Popolare di Vicenza and Veneto Banca.

These mandates come ahead of Italy’s move to the new Target 2-Securities (T2S) pan-European trade settlement platform in June. T2S will harmonise cross border settlements across Europe, increasing the efficiency of European financial markets.

“Italy will pioneer T2S, becoming the first major market to move all securities transactions to the platform. We are delighted to be working with these banks as they prepare for the move,” said Alessandro Gioffreda, head of BNP Paribas Securities Services for Italy, Switzerland and the Mediterranean Basin. 

“We will provide them with a single point of contact for settling both their domestic and cross border transactions and accessing banking services such as liquidity management.”

By connecting to T2S via a local custodian such as BNP Paribas Securities Services, bank scan take advantage of the new efficiencies created by the T2S platform across Europe while saving on implementation costs. 

They can also benefit from specialised local asset servicing in each market, including corporate actions processing and income collection,which varies across locations and requires local expertise.BNP Paribas provides local and global custody in all markets that will eventually migrate to the T2S platform. 

It recently launched Liquidity Access, a suite of products designed to help banks and broker-dealers manage and monitor their liquid assets.