ICE and CME Repositories Win European Approval

The European Securities and Markets Authority has approved UK-based units of ICE and CME as trade repositories, adding to the first four that were authorised at the start of this month.

ESMA said in a statement that ICE Trade Vault Europe Ltd (ICE TVEL) and CME Trade Repository Ltd (CME TR), have been registered as trade repositories for the European Union. Both businesses are based in the UK and their registrations take effect on 5 December 2013. The regulator said it has not received any other registration applications. 

Counterparties who use registered trade repositories will meet their derivatives trade reporting requirements under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation. Reporting is due to start on 12 February next year.

Five derivative asset classes are covered by EMIR – credit, interest rate, equity, foreign exchange and commodities – which also requires both counterparties to report over-the-counter and exchange-traded deals.

ICE Trade Vault Europe said in a statement that it has been approved to collect trade data in four of these asset classes – commodities, credit, interest rate and equities. It is not collecting foreign exchange data.

The exchange already operates ICE Trade Vault US and is planning to launch repository services in Asia and Australia. In the US, the ICE trade repository became the first Swap Data Repository to receive provisional regulatory approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in June last year. ICE Trade Vault US has accepted over seventeen million trades since its launch according to the statement. 

Bruce Tupper, president of ICE Trade Vault said in the statement: “Since the development of ICE Trade Vault, our goal is to offer a global trade repository solution and the approval by ESMA advances that vision.”

ICE clients will be able to use their existing connectivity to meet the EMIR reporting obligations through Trade Vault.

CME European Trade Repository will provide reporting  for all five asset classes according to a statement. CME ETR said it will adapt the technology and infrastructure developed for CME’s US swap repository. CME Group operates one of only three Swap Data Repositories which were authorised last year for reporting under the Dodd Frank Act in the US. 

Jonathan Thursby, president, CME Global Repository Services, said in the statement: “This European addition to our existing CME Swap Data Repository in the US means that we can help our global and regional customers fully comply with multi-jurisdictional reporting.”

The exchange said that In conjunction with its approved trade repository, it will offer a delegated reporting service to its EU customers to comply with EMIR.  

ICE and CME will be competing with the  four repositories that  were approved on November 7:

– DTCC Derivatives Repository Ltd. (DDRL), the UK-based European arm of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the US clearer;
– Krajowy Depozyt Papierów Wartosciowych (KDPW) in Poland
– Regis-TR, based in Luxembourg and jointly owned by Deutsche Börse’s Clearstream and the Spanish Stock Exchange’s Iberclear
– UnaVista, owned by the London Stock Exchange Group and based in the UK.

Stewart Macbeth, chief executive of DTCC Derivatives Repository Limited (DDRL) and chief product development officer, DTCC Deriv/SERV, told Markets Media this month: “We are testing with more than 1,000 clients and expect that to grow. We are seeing a lot of interest from pension fund managers, large asset managers and corporates.”

Macbeth said customers with an existing connection to DTCC can use the trade repository be ensuring their messages have the right DTCC legal entity, they explicitly input “ESMA” in the message formats and add some EU specific fields.

Mark Husler, chief executive of UnaVista, told Markets Media this month that his platform is the only one approved to report under both the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and the upcoming European Market Infrastructure Regulation.

“UnaVista is already a multi-asset class platform reporting around 1.5 billion trades a year under MiFID,” said Husler. “We are the only authorized trade repository which is also an Approved Reporting Mechanism (ARM) under MiFID and there are obvious benefits for clients being able to use the same software for both.”

David Retana, managing director of Regis-TR, told Markets Media this month: “The number of clients with access to the test environment is now more than 600 with about 15 joining every week. Clients have increased since we received the license and we have signed more than 100 contracts including banks of significant size and central clearing counterparties.

Regis-TR initially aimed to service small and medium-sized European corporates, who did not previously have to report trades, but its technology has also attracted larger banks and corporates. “Our model is focused on Europe and we have no intention of moving into other jurisdictions,” Retana added.