More of the employees of the securities industry’s clearing and settlement utility now pay their taxes in the Garden State.
That’s because most of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s nearly 2,000-person Northeast workforce was recently moved from lower Manhattan to Jersey City, DTCC officials say.
Superstorm Sandy damaged DTCC’s headquarters office at 55 Water Street, soaking a part of physical certificate records in its vault. However, the employee move across the river to New Jersey to the Newport Office Center in Jersey City was planned before the storm. Displacement by the storm speeded up the relocation.
“We had expected to move a large part of our workforce to Jersey City by 2013, but this has accelerated the process,” said Judith Inosanto, vice president of communications for the DTCC.
Earlier this year DTCC officials had said that in early 2013 they would transfer some 1,600 workers to the Newport Office Center in Jersey City, which has become a low price alternative for numerous financial firms that had been in Manhattan.
But Sandy forced DTCC workers to operate in several locations in the New York metropolitan area.
They began to work from Jersey City, from an emergency recovery site in Brooklyn and at home, although DTCC wouldn’t give a breakdown.
The New Jersey-based employees will include most of the product development, clearing operations, technology and similar functional areas, DTCC said.
The storm also accelerated the process of moving the DTCC’s physical securities, some of which were damaged in the vault at Water Street during Super Storm Sandy. In the six weeks since the storm, the certificates have been moved to a vault another location. But, for security reasons, DTCC officials will not say where the new location is. Inosanto praised the DTCC data center team, saying they did a “great job” in preparing for the storm and getting the clearing and settlement utility going again after it hit. Electronic records were in place for 95% of the certificates affected by the storm, when it drenched the vault in lower Manhattan.
DTCC’s travails are typical of many firms in lower Manhattan, where some financial firms have found going back has been slow. For example, Morgan Stanley has returned its technologists to One New York Plaza, which is next to the Hudson River and a stone’s throw from DTCC’s offices at 55 Water Street.
But Morgan Stanley has yet to bring staff back to offices at 111 Wall Street, according to a person with knowledge of the recovery effort.
It’s also unclear when DTCC will move some employees back into its 55 Water Street headquarters as the city continues to try to clean up the mess left by the storm.
“While 55 Water Street has reopened to the public on a limited basis, we are assessing the condition of our offices,” Inosanto says. She added that DTCC would have a better idea in January of when its workers could return to Water Street.
Roughly 700 DTCC employees will continue to work in New York City.
But when the utility is finally is back in its Water Street offices, she said senior management will split its time between Manhattan and Jersey City. Whenever that is, Inosanto said New York based employees would include “those in our derivatives and trade repository business and most of our joint venture companies.”
