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THE STORY OF THE DEPOSITORY TRUST & CLEARING CORPORATION
coupons, but well into the 21st century, DTC was responsible for clipping the coupons and submitting them. “Brokers didn’t want to do it,” Feuchtwanger said. “So they gave us the bonds to hold. It was a massive process.” DTC soon had custody of millions of municipal bonds. “We had hundreds of people that would sit down with little ruler-like devices tearing coupons off these bonds to present them to get paid,” Dirks said. Because of the inability to track bonds—and ensure taxes were being paid— Congress eliminated bearer bonds by passing the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982. Bearer bonds that were still in existence would be dealt with manually until they matured. Whether bond or stock certificate, much of the manual process was handled by clerks, who were crucial to accuracy and speed. When DTC’s predecessor Central Certificate Service (CCS) spun out of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1972, some 800 unionized CCS clerks were part of the new CCS. Still, NYSE continued to negotiate with the union on behalf of itself, DTC and the Securities Industry Automation Corporation. In 1985, after NYSE stopped short of guaranteeing jobs for more than 300 pages and clerks who could be laid off due to automation, talks of a strike began to spread. The last strike against the Exchange had occurred in 1947. As negotiations continued through the first half of 1985, DTC prepared for what it believed was an unlikely event. “We didn’t think they would strike,” said Bill Jaenike, who was then the executive vice president of operations. “But we got ready, just in case.” On a Friday night in June, the union voted to strike in a 911 to 76 vote. With that, about 1,400 employees who were members of the Office and Professional Employees International Local 133 would not be showing up for work on the following Monday. DTC only had two days to prepare, but thanks to the preplanning and assistance from participants, the firm was able to weather what would become a three-week strike. For CEO William Dentzer, the event sent a powerful signal of the importance of building resilience into the firm’s operations:
William Dentzer led Central Certificate Service (CCS) and DTC for 22 years.
BILL JAENIKE: DTC CHAIRMAN AND CEO 1994--1999
Bill Jaenike went to college during the Space Race and opted to study electrical engineering, hoping to work for any company in high tech. A summer internship at the New York Central Railroad led to a full-time job, followed by a stint at Xerox, where he worked on a high-speed facsimile machine that transmitted a page in five seconds. Jaenike brought those skills to Wall Street, joining the American Stock Exchange in 1968 as a communications consultant. It was the height of the paperwork crisis and
Jaenike had a front-row seat to the development of a solution: Central Certificate Service (CCS). As CCS morphed into The Depository Trust Company, Jaenike would begin rising in the ranks before succeeding founding chairman and CEO Bill Dentzer in 1994. Jaenike’s tenure as a leader was marked by an increasing sophistication of technology that solidified DTC’s reputation as a technology-driven company founded on crisis and built on solutions.
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