Managing operations - remotely

We started off the year by announcing a price reduction on exchange traded products, and with a focus on our newly launched strategy. Little did we know that just three months later we would find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic and an entirely new normal – providing issuance and settlement services for all of our customers while the bulk of our employees worked from home. Of course, we weren’t alone in this endeavour, and we want to thank all of you for your flexibility and cooperation in helping us to continue operations during this unprecedented situation.

A year of milestones

2020 was in many ways a landmark year for VP. In July, we marked our 40th year as a CSD, and one month after, we officially became a part of the Euronext Group. At the same time, we said goodbye to Niels Olsen, who resigned as CEO in order to start a new phase in his professional and personal life, and Maria Hjorth was appointed as the new CEO. We’ve also made organisational adjustments that will make it easier for us to work across functions and in an agile manner. Amidst all of this change, we continued working on our comprehensive compliance projects: CSDRII and SRDII.

Learning from incidents

2020 was also the year where we experienced how an error on the T2S platform can have a significant impact on CSDs across Europe, our own infrastructure included. Since the incident in May of this year, we have spent time analysing our response and the factors contributing to the error, and we’ve worked hard so that we can be in an even better position should an incident arise in the future. In that connection, we want to thank all of you for your open communication, feedback and support, as we worked together to address the issue.

Reaching (and surpassing) our targets

It is a testimony to the hard work of everyone involved and the productive cooperation we have with our customers that we succeeded in meeting the majority of our 2020 targets. One which we’re particularly proud of is the results of our customer satisfaction survey, where VP scored an index 74. While we’ll be reporting a bit more on the survey results in the new year, we’re pleased to see that we were effective in our efforts to put our customers first, in spite of the myriad of challenges we’ve all faced this year.

Looking ahead to 2021

If we shift our gaze to the new year, we will continue integrating our strategy and processes with the other Euronext CSDs. We also look forward to working with the newest addition to the Euronext CSD portfolio: Borsa Italiana Group. We expect to see an even stronger cooperation across the CSDs in Portugal, Norway and soon, Italy. Our customers will also have a more uniform experience when dealing with Euronext CSDs, irrespective of their location. And on a strategic level, we will continue our work on innovation, leveraging new technologies and digitalisation, to provide more value-adding services to our customers.

We wish you all a safe and festive holiday season. See you in the new year!