Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation

Taiwan’s stock market has seen robust trading activity in recent years, with average daily turnover holding above NT$1 trillion. Trading volumes and share prices have repeatedly reached new highs, while investor participation continues to grow. Taiwan Depository & Clearing Corporation (TDCC) plays a vital role in the capital market’s post-trade infrastructure, providing market-wide services that include centralized securities custody, book-entry transfer, registration and delivery, as well as the generation and distribution of the register of shareholders . These operations are closely interdependent.

TDCC President Daniel Chen said that TDCC recently completed enhancements to its core securities system to ensure safe and smooth market operations amid high trading volumes. The enhancements improve operational efficiency while maintaining market security, focusing on three key areas to strengthen post-trade processing capacity and operational resilience.

1. Expanding Trade Data Processing Capacity

Surges in trading activity can place substantial demands on systems processing large volumes of transaction data. Amid the recent increase in Taiwan’s stock market activity, the daily number of trades reached a record high of more than 11.52 million. Although this remains well below TDCC’s processing capacity, TDCC has proactively optimized its processing programs and database maintenance architecture, increasing maximum processing capacity for trade data by more than 30%. These improvements help ensure that settlement and reconciliation operations continue to run smoothly without bottlenecks, even if trading volumes rise to exceptionally high levels in the future.

2. Increasing Processing Capacity for Securities Lending and Fixed-Term Fixed-Amount Investment

The volume of securities lending transactions handled by securities firms has grown steadily in recent years. Previously, data exchanges with the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TWSE) were processed in real time, one transaction at a time. TDCC has introduced a concurrent processing architecture, raising processing performance to more than five times its previous level and significantly reducing waiting times for book-entry transfers. TDCC has comprehensively enhanced processing for the popular fixed-term fixed-amount investment plans in response to the growing number of retail investors making small, regular investments. Files are now processed immediately upon receipt, allowing allocation calculations to begin as soon as securities firms submit their data and substantially reducing the time needed to produce allocation results. Maximum daily processing capacity for these plans has increased from 7.7 million to more than 20 million transaction records. These improvements enable securities firms to conduct inquiries and reconcile accounts more efficiently, while allowing investors to confirm account debits and details of their share purchases sooner.

3. Reducing Overnight Maintenance Time

The number of securities holdings records for investors across Taiwan now exceeds 120 million. At the close of each business day, TDCC must accurately reconcile the latest securities holdings of each investor. To accommodate rising daily trade counts, TDCC has significantly improved system performance through parallel processing and enhanced database maintenance techniques. For a peak-volume trading day involving 10 million trades, overnight account maintenance can now be completed in under 2.5 hours, down from four hours—a reduction of nearly 40%. This accelerates overall batch processing and strengthens TDCC’s operational capability and resilience in responding to unusual market conditions. The shorter processing time also enables more timely inquiry services on the following trading day and provides a solid foundation for future integration with international securities markets and the implementation of new regulatory policies and frameworks.

TDCC emphasized that securities clearing and settlement operations are essential to safeguarding the assets and rights of investors across the market. Safety and soundness have always been its highest priorities. All system performance enhancements undergo rigorous testing before deployment, with existing and new processes run in parallel to verify data consistency item by item. Enhancements are implemented only after the accuracy of account processing has been confirmed, ensuring operational efficiency as well as the security of account processing.

TDCC will continue to enhance the information systems supporting its core businesses, strengthen operational resilience, improve service efficiency, and put Trustworthy Finance into practice. Guided by stability, security, and innovation, TDCC remains committed to providing Taiwan’s capital market with a broad range of high-quality, convenient services.