Company History
& Spanish Experience

2020 marked the 10th anniversary of the Acupay/Monte Titoli Italian Yankee Bond structure. 5 years earlier, Acupay was founded. It grew out of a sister company called Bondholder Communications Group which specialized in bondholder identifications in relation to a variety of corporate actions.  Acupay shared its core competency and technology, and started doing bondholder identifications for tax purposes. In 2005 Acupay’s sole market was Spain. Spanish bond issuers were confronted with new tax legislation that required them to collect the identity of their investors for tax purposes.

For Spanish issuers, satisfying this requirement as well as complying with the reporting and withholding needs of the Spanish tax authorities was no problem, as long as the bonds were issued locally through the Spanish Central Securities Depositary (“CSD”) Iberclear or through the facilities of Euroclear and Clearstream in the case of a traditional Eurobond.

For those issuers who wanted to tap a foreign capital market directly and fully realize the cost and market access benefits of doing so, there was no access route. Acupay filled this gap by coming up with a system that allowed international investors in cross-border Spanish debt to certify for tax purposes and benefit from a reduced Spanish withholding tax rate. At the same time Acupay developed tax procedures that were interoperable with the functioning of the American CSD, DTC.