OREANDA-NEWS. April 23, 2012. The Supervisory Board of National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia's only settlement depository servicing the full range of debt and equity securities of Russian issuers, approved an acquisition of six shares of S.W.I.F.T., offered by S.W.I.F.T. following its Board of Directors' decision. This offer was made due to significant growth in NSD's traffic resulted from NDC's merger with MICEX Settlement House.

NSD uses S.W.I.F.T. services in the course of its interactions with foreign banks with which NSD opened foreign currency accounts, as well as with international settlement depositories, Russian depositories, and its major clients while processing cash and securities settlements.

NSD also renders services to Russian financial organizations connecting them to S.W.I.F.T. through Shared Connection scheme and managing their S.W.I.F.T. accounts, as it holds all necessary licenses for providing these types of services. To date, approximately 70 Russia's and CIS countries' companies are connected to S.W.I.F.T. by means the simplified connection via NSD.

NSD regards S.W.I.F.T. as an alternative communications channel for its interactions with the Bank of Russia using the Banking Electronic Speedy Payments (BESP) system. In 2011, NSD took part in testing of the BESP-SWIFT gateway allowing direct participants of the settlements to interact with the BESP through S.W.I.F.T.

The members of NSD's Supervisory Board took into consideration the report for 1Q 2012 presented by the Controller-Chief of the Department of Internal Audit of the Professional Securities Market Participants of NSD's Internal Audit Division.