The Consolidated Dividends Service is an online service designed to streamline the dividend payment process for CREST participants with designated accounts.

This subscription service allows users to apply payment instructions automatically across their member accounts and download information electronically instead of receiving paper tax vouchers.

The benefits

The Consolidated Dividends Service provides a number of key benefits to the processing of multiple dividend payments including:

• Less paper - there is no longer the need to deal with large volumes of cheques and tax vouchers
• Improved efficiency - dividend payments can now be reconciled electronically before the payment date allowing quicker payment to underlying beneficiaries
• Simplified book-keeping - a single tax voucher is issued per dividend per CREST participant
• Data security - our software encrypts any data transferred between our site and your PC.

How the service works

Setting up the service

A dividend mandate is applied by Equiniti to all CREST member accounts in a participant. This is done each time a dividend is paid so that any new accounts are picked up at the dividend record date.

The CREST participant registers for a Selector account and then elects to register for the Consolidated Dividends Service. Where there are multiple CREST participants these can be added as part of the same registration.

Prior to payment date

A few days prior to the dividend date for each dividend paid, Equiniti produces a computer file containing a breakdown of payments due to each member account and a corresponding total which represents the full payment to the CREST participant.

The file is presented in an agreed industry format and consists of a ‘header’ record of dividend parameters, a ‘body’ record of member account payments and a ‘footer’ record containing totals.

When the file is ready for collection, an email is sent to the Selector account holder advising that the file is ready for download from the ‘Collect file’ service in Selector.

Given that the file can be delivered before the payment date, the participant can be fully reconciled to the estimate of member payments, avoiding the need for a clerical tick back against a paper list.

Payment date

On the payment date, the total dividend shown in the ‘footer’ record of the file is the amount that is sent to the participants bank account. The payment can be made as a single BACS payment or by cheque depending on how the CREST security pay.

Your next step

For more information on the Consolidated Dividend Service please contact our Corporate Services Team on 01903 833265 or email to lance.allen@equiniti.com.