The Central Securities Depository and Clearing House is an institution that keeps the sole records about owners of securities issued on the territory of the Republic of Serbia. In addition, the Central Securities Depository and Clearing House offers a clearing facility and balances the payments and liabilities in securities and money deriving from the trade in securities, i.e. transfers the ownership of the securities simultaneously with their payments. The Central Securities Depository and Clearing House is an institution of exceptional importance and relevance for the efficient functioning of the financial market. The existence and operation of this institution ensures security to all present and future investors.

One of the first steps in building the basic infrastructure for financial market development in Serbia was the completion of the project for establishing of the Central Securities Depository and Clearing House at the National Bank of Yugoslavia – Payments Operations Bureau that commenced in the mid nineties. The system was based on the principle of registering and transfer of ownership of previously deposited securities, while the financial transaction balancing was exclusively done at banks. In light of the fact that financial liabilities were paid in foreign currencies, the payments were made through foreign correspondent banks. Taking into consideration the number of links in the chain of balancing, the balancing of a significant number of transactions was not done in the envisaged period T+3 (three days after the transaction). In addition, the system was expensive since international payment operations fees were paid for each money transaction. In case when transactions were less than 100 euro, costs reached up to 5% of the transaction market value. Considering that the system did not satisfy the needs of the client nor was in accordance with the international standards, in 2002 the redesign of the entire process in technical and procedural terms started. Furthermore, new functions were introduced in the work of the Central Securities Depository – the clearinghouse function - i.e. centralized balancing of financial transactions. In January 2003, the new platform for balancing and clearing of securities was officially operative. The entire system was completed with the autonomous status of the Central Securities Registry and its separation from the National Bank of Serbia in December 2003, as well as through the transfer of the stockowners database kept at the Temporary Registry at the Privatization Agency in January 2004.

After a detailed analysis of existing IT system in the Central Securities Depository and Clearing House, Pexim’s AIS team detected problems in respect of the main hardware and lack of appropriate equipment for data storage, which are of vital importance for the conduct of operations. There was an evident need for installation of data storage devices that would provide reliable keeping of information with high-level protection from error and loss. Until then, the data was stored at an archiving system, which did not fulfill the necessary criteria, having limited performances and being susceptible to failures. The needs for data storage room went beyond the capacities of the existing storage facilities. In addition to the limitations of the performances of the existing data storage devices, the Central Securities Depository and Clearing House established the need for highly efficient protection of vital importance data at its headquarters. Hence, a decision was adopted for the purchase of the fault-tolerant storage system that enables internal fail-over (processors, power supply, controllers) in order to ensure relevant data availability. Aiming to completely overcome detected problems, Pexim proposed introduction of a remote location at which all production data would be copied. Furthermore, it was necessary to implement the storage data center in terms of protection, quality management of vital information, facilitated maintenance of the existing and/or future resources and decreasing the number of steps necessary to conduct specific operations.

The Central Securities Depository and Clearing House recognized the need for upgrading the existing resources and introducing new ones. Therefore, since highest quality of services and assistance in restructuring was a must, Pexim was selected to implement the whole project.

• Integration of new hardware into the existing network infrastructure
• Installation and configuration of delivered hardware/software
• Installation and configuration of Microsoft Cluster Service
• Installation and configuration of MS SQL 2000 Enterprise server in the cluster operation mode
• Transfer of the current production environment to the new Data Center

• Gathering data necessary for the solution design and implementation
• Coordination of the entire Project Team
• Implementation of the production environment and technical/technological operative examination of the offered solution
• Delivery of documentation from whom entire production environment could be replicated in case of disaster failur

• Availability of information required by the Project Team
• Maximum availability of the Client’s IT personnel assigned to this Project
• Efficient realization of the test environment
• Communication of the Project Team with the rest of the Client’s IT/business environment
• Fast procurement of necessary hardware for the testing/production environment

• EMC storage system
• IBM servers
• Installation of  Windows 2003 EE
• Advanced implementation of Windows 2003 
• Configuration of the provisional testing AD environment exclusively for the needs of MSCS
• MSCS Configuration
• Installations of 2 instances of MSSQL 2000 EE SP3a server as a clustered resource
• Advanced adjustment of Windows SQL 2000 EE service
• Restore of MSSQL Base
• Advanced adjustment to the MSSQL server