The third phase of SFTR reporting has gone live. As of today, SFTR reporting obligations will apply to investment funds, pensions funds and (re-)insurance undertakings, who will join sell-side firms, CCPs and CSDs, who have already been reporting for 3 months. The first few months of SFTR reporting have certainly exceeded expectations with consistently high acceptance rates reported by the trade repositories. It is hoped that the buy-side firms that start reporting today can build on and replicate this success.

ICMA has been leading the implementation process for SFTR reporting of repos in a collaborative effort coordinated by the ERCC’s SFTR Task Force. The Task Force brings together around 700 individuals representing more than 150 firms, including most of the key players on the buy-side. It has also consulted with buy-side associations, in particular, the Investment Association in the UK.

? Buy-side starts reporting under SFTR todayhttps://t.co/p7fCHh2Xdu

You can find all @icmagroup best practice guides as well as reporting reports and analysis (as mentioned in our document below) on our SFTR page ⤵️https://t.co/LyJJXyzzw7

— ICMA (@ICMAgroup) October 12, 2020

Based on feedback from the Task Force, ICMA has put together detailed best practice recommendations for the industry which complement and supplement the regulatory framework and aim to ensure consistency in firms’ implementation efforts (and a Quick Guide mapping recommendations to data fields). Over the past weeks, in the run-up to today’s go-live, discussions have focused on a number of specifically buy-side questions, including reporting issues for multi-managed funds, particularly for the reporting of reuse and variation margining, but also the classification of investment managers. These discussions have led to a few last-minute updates to the ICMA recommendations.

In addition to the best practices, ICMA has published a set of sample reports, some of which show how buy-side repos should be reported. ICMA is also publishing, on a weekly basis, consolidated SFTR data released by the TRs. Figures and charts from the first 3 months of reporting are available on the SFTR public data page. We will continue to publish and analyse the data and will of course track the impact of today’s expansion of the reporting population on the statistics.

Source: ICMA