The European Securities and Markets Authority is keeping the industry on pins and needles while it waits for the regulator to publish the final version of its EMIR reporting technical standards.

“We don’t know when they will implement the new standards apart from the fact that it will be nine months after the new reporting technical standards enter into force,” said David Nowell, head of industry relations and regulatory compliance for UnaVista at the London Stock Exchange, during a public webinar on July 6. “Our current best guess is Q2 2017.”

In the meantime, market participants need to decide whether to start updating their reporting system, or wait for the ink to dry on the final version of the EMIR RTS.

“We’re 90% sure of the content of the RTS,” said Tom Wieczorek, head product management at LSEG Information Services. “We’ve been surprised before. I wouldn’t rule out that there would be some minor changes.”

However, the regulator already has made major changes from its previous draft to its current draft, including adding 45 new data fields. The latest draft consists of 35 counter-party field and 94 common-data fields, which include several new asset-specific fields for credit default swaps.

“I’d be very surprised if the fields themselves change,” said Nowell. “That would be quite a nuclear option for them to change the fields at this stage.”

He attributes the increased number of fields in the current draft to time constraints that the regulators faced in developing the previous draft as well as writing derivatives trade reporting standards for the first time.

Wieczorek commented that firms might consider looking at the individual fields and start planning to pull those fields from their data warehouses, but wait to work on the actual formatting of those fields until ESMA finally published the final version of the RTS.

If ESMA releases the final version in September, he estimates that UnaVista would spend the fourth quarter of the year making any necessary changes and enhancements to its trade repository.

“As soon as we do that, we can release all of the documentation and specifications and validation rules to our clients,” he said. “Even though we would not have a system ready yet at the beginning of 2017, clients will have the specification for the fields and workflow so that they can start planning and delivering on their builds. Then we will build our repository and be ready three months before the reporting goes live.”

 

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