Category: European Union Electricity Market Glossary

 

Trade repository (TR) is a legal person that centrally collects and maintains the records of derivatives. The term is defined in the EMIR Regulation

         
                 
                                          New       

 

 

Trade repositories are central points for EMIR reporting infrastructure with their tasks mainly determined by the scope of EMIR derivatives reporting requirements - covering all derivatives and not OTC derivatives only. Trade repositories play a pivotal role of providing derivatives data to competent authorities and are a central market infrastructure established to improve the transparency of derivatives markets.

Among first trade repositories for the European Union registered by the ESMA were:

However, on 4 January 2021, ESMA withdrawed, as the Brexit's consequence, the registrations of the following UK-based trade repositories:
* DTCC Derivatives Repository Plc;
* UnaVista Limited;
* CME Trade Repository Ltd; and
* ICE Trade Vault Europe Ltd.

See here the ESMA's list of approved trade repositories.

 

There should be borne in mind, trade repositories concept, is however, global in nature, and, as of August 2015, there were 26 of them in 16 jurisdictions (besides, with no system for aggregating the data or even ensuring the data is comparable).

 

 

 

quote


Trade reporting to TRs began in February 2014. By the end of 2015 almost 27 billion reports had been received by TRs, with an average of around 330 million trade reports submitted per week. ESMA has observed increasing interest in the TR business [...].

In addition, ESMA notes that registered TRs are looking to expand their businesses into new areas, for example by offering other reporting services.

 

ESMA Annual Report 2015, 15 June 2016, ESMA/2016/960, p. 55, 56

 

 

Anyway, the derivatives contracts under EMIR are to be reported to a trade repository registered with ESMA or recognised by ESMA. In principle, where a trade repository is not available to record the details of a derivative contract, such details are reported to ESMA. The possibility for CCPs applying for registration as a trade repository is legally excluded. Trade repository is allowed to perform ancillary services, Article 78(5) of EMIR, however, requires these services to be operationally separate. EMIR does not restrict the provision of trade repository activities to legally separate entities. 

Entities authorised to provide other regulated activities cannot be prevented from applying for registration as a trade repository unless they are prevented from doing this by other sectoral legislation. In these cases, similarly to the cases of ancillary activities, the regulated activities performed by the trade repository should be operationally separated from the trade repository activity.  

 

Under EMIR, ESMA has direct responsibilities regarding the registration, supervision and recognition of trade repositories; this work is directed by a specific annual Trade Repository Supervision Work Programme. Supervision of trade repositories by ESMA aims to ensure that they comply on an ongoing basis with all EMIR requirements, thereby enabling regulators to access data and details of derivative contracts in order for them to fulfil their respective mandates. For the supervision of trade repositories, ESMA has the right to require information, to conduct general investigations and on-site inspections, and if needed, to take enforcement measures.

clip2   Links

 

ESMA's list of approved trade repositories


According to the the European Commission’s reminder of 14 July 2020 (Notice to Stakeholders on Withdrawal of the United Kingdom and EU rules in the field of post-trade financial instruments, REV1 - replacing the notice dated 8 February 2018), in the absence of the relevant agreement, without equivalence and recognition, after the end of the transition period, trade repositories established in the United Kingdom cannot be used to fulfil the reporting obligation.

“While the assessment of the UK’s equivalence in this area is ongoing, the assessment has not been finalised,” the EU executive arm said. “All stakeholders thus have to be informed and ready for a scenario where the UK established trade repositories cannot be used to fulfil the reporting obligation under EMIR and SFTR”.

 

Trade repository as an ARM

 

EMIR (Article 9) and MiFID (Article 25 of Directive 2004/39/EC of 21 April 2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council on Markets in Financial Instruments) require that transactions on derivatives admitted to trading to a regulated market are subject to both reporting under MiFID (direct reporting to competent authorities) and under EMIR (reporting to trade repositories for the purpose of making the data available to the relevant authorities in accordance with their regulatory needs).

Following the start of EMIR reporting to trade repositories on 12 February 2014, MiFID transaction reporting obligations remain unchanged. Reporting to trade repositories under EMIR does not replace any transaction reporting obligation under MiFID and firms should continue to submit their transaction reports under MiFID.

MiFIR establishes the rule that trade-matching or reporting systems, including trade repositories registered or recognised in accordance with EMIR, may be approved by the competent authority as an ARM in order to transmit transaction reports to the competent authority.

In cases where transactions have been reported in accordance with EMIR to a trade repository, which is approved as an ARM, and where these reports contain the details required by MiFID 2 and are transmitted to the competent authority by the trade repository within the time limit set in MiFID 2, the obligation to report data laid down on the investment firm by MiFID 2 is considered to have been complied with.

ARM having EMIR trade repository functionality is for instance UnaVista Limited.

 

Eligibility to provide portfolio compression services 

 

Portfolio compression services may be provided by trade repositories irrespective of whether they are regulated under MiFID/MiFIR (see MiFIR Recital 8).

 

Trade repository vs. Registered Reporting Mechanisms (RRM)

 

In 2015 three trade repositories started offering reporting services related to wholesale energy market integrity and transparency under the REMIT Regulation (see further remarks on -> trade repositories' interrelations with Registered Reporting Mechanisms (RRMs) relevant for -> REMIT reporting).

 

Reporting channels

 

Market participants have the possibilities to report derivatives themselves or to delegate reporting to their counterparty or another service provider. There are the following possibilities regarding practical configurations as regards reporting:

1) one counterparty delegates on the other counterparty;

2) one counterparty delegates on a third party;

3) both counterparties delegate on a single third party;

4) both counterparties delegate on two different third parties.

 

A third party may perform the function of reporting for the counterparties to the trade only through a previous agreement (on behalf of one or both counterparties), nevertheless the obligation to report lies always on the counterparties to a trade.

It is important to take into account that investment firms that provide investment services (like execution of orders or receipt and transmission of orders) do not have any obligation to report under EMIR unless they become a counterparty of a transaction by acting as principal: nothing prevents counterparties to a derivative to use an investment firm (as a broker) as a third party for TR reporting, but this is a general possibility in all cases. 

When counterparty is dealing bilaterally with another counterparty through a broker, which acts as agent (introducing broker) the said broker is not signing or entering into any derivative contract with any of the counterparties and, consequently, is not considered as a counterparty under EMIR, thus also not being under the duty to report.

When reporting is delegated it is advisable for firms to safeguard free access to data included in their EMIR reports, in order to check that their reports are being correctly submitted to the trade repository. Trade repositories often offer such a type of membership (enabling only access to trade reports already entered by other counterparties), which involves significantly reduced membership fees.

 

TR registration framework under SFTR

 

Article 5(1) of the Regulation (EU) 2015/2365 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on transparency of securities financing transactions and of reuse and amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 (SFTR) requires the TRs to register with ESMA for the purposes of the fulfilment of the reporting obligation established in Article 4 SFTR. They need to register under the conditions and the procedure set out in Article 5 SFTR.

All the general, operational reliability, safeguarding and recording requirements for registration of TRs under EMIR are envisioned to be taken into account also for the purposes of registering the TRs under SFTR. Accordingly, all the requirements with respect to the derivative contracts reported under Article 9 EMIR should be understood as references to Article 4 SFTR.  For instance, the TRs must ensure the confidentiality, integrity and protection of data received under Article 4 SFTR in the same way as they ensure the confidentiality, integrity and protection of data received under Article 9 EMIR. The SFTR has also imposed some new requirements regarding the procedures that TRs must have in place to ensure the completeness and correctness of SFTs reported to them.

The procedures that TRs must have in place are set out by Article 5(2) SFTR, and RTS stipulate that TRs would need to provide information on these procedures as part of their application for registration, which are:
- authentication — a procedure to authenticate the reporting party and its users,
- schema validation — a procedure to ensure that the information received from reporting parties are in the relevant schema (which is likely to be the xml template based on ISO 20022),

-  authorisation/permission — a procedure to ensure a reporting party has the permission to report SFTs on behalf of other parties to the TR. This includes information on actions that must be taken by the TR both prior to and during reporting,
- logical validation — a procedure to ensure that there are no intended modifications to an SFT which has not been reported or has been cancelled,
- content validation — a procedure to ensure submissions are compliant with relevant business rules,
- reconciliation of data — a procedure to ensure reconcilability of SFTs reported to different TRs,

- feedback to participants — a procedure to ensure timely response of TRs to reporting party as to whether their submissions have been accepted and reconciled, as well as standard end-of-day SFT reports to reporting parties.


In addition to the new provisions relating to ensuring completeness and correctness of SFTs, there are other new provisions incorporated into the RTS on SFTR, namely:
- TRs need to identify the relevant competent authority of a member state, where they are already registered or authorised by that competent authority,
- TRs should employ at least one person with education and experience in IT to assume responsibility on IT matters. In addition, there should be sufficient level of knowledge and experience on IT issues on the board, and a proportion of the senior management should have academic degrees, deep knowledge and experience on IT management and SDLC,

- TRs should provide a detailed description of the system supporting SFTR reporting, including: business requirements; functional specialities; technical specifications; system architectural and detailed design; data model and data flows; and operations and administration procedures and manuals,
- TRs should include explicit compliance with the terms and conditions defined in the RTS under Article 12(3)(d),
- TRs should have a procedure to allow for the timely, structured and comprehensive aggregation and comparison of data across TRs by the relevant authorities,
- TRs should provide voluntary portability between TRs in the case of withdrawal of registration,
- TRs should include proof of payment of relevant registration fees,
- TRs should provide the relevant policies, procedures, mechanisms and controls in place to protect TR data from cyber-attacks (see Final Report, Technical standards under SFTR and certain amendments to EMIR, 31 March 2017, ESMA70-708036281-82).

 

Trade repositories' market

 

Pursuant to the document "ESMA's supervision of credit rating agencies, trade repositories and monitoring of third country central counterparties, 2016 annual report and 2017 work programme", 3 February 2017, ESMA80-1467488426-27 (p. 20, 21, 26) market shares of the EU registered trade repositories seem relatively stable, they remained unchanged across 2015 and 2016.

The above ESMA's report of 3 February 2017 further observes that "compared to its peers, DTCC Derivatives Repository Limited continues to lead in terms of number of clients served and reports received" and that "other trade repositories further strengthened their client base through other services offered by the groups of companies they belong to". Proximity of the trade repositories (e.g. same country and same group as the reporting entity) also seems to be considered by clients in their choice of TR.

By the end of 2016, the TRs reported on behalf of approximately 5,500 direct clients. This number includes third parties who report on behalf of other counterparties and entities. These counterparties and entities have only the right to view data that has been reported on their behalf.

In total, there are around 300,000 counterparties whose trades are reported to TRs.

 

Trade repositories as a source of transparent market data

 

EFET and EURELECTRIC in the document Joint EFET-EURELECTRIC response of 1 February 2016 to ESMA consultation on draft technical standards on access to data and aggregation and comparison of TR data across TR under Article 81 of EMIR invited ESMA observed that no TR is currently providing a service for publishing (anonymised) transaction data to agreed standards and definitions to facilitate greater transparency and to support the implementation of MiFID II.

 


EMIR, Article 81(1)

A trade repository shall regularly, and in an easily accessible way, publish aggregate positions by class of derivatives on the contracts reported to it.

 

This is in spite of the fact that Article 81(1) of EMIR requires TRs to make the aggregated positions of derivatives reported to them accessible to the public. The said organisations underlined that market participants need robust information on the size of commodity derivative markets for assessing themselves against the commodity ancillary activity exemptions and TRs are ideally placed to provide this information in a transparent and robust way in line with agreed standard definitions.

Commission Staff Working Document Impact Assessment, Accompanying the document Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 as regards the clearing obligation, the suspension of the clearing obligation, the reporting requirements, the risk-mitigation techniques for OTC derivatives contracts not cleared by a central counterparty, the registration and supervision of trade repositories and the requirements for trade repositories {COM(2017) 208 final} {SWD(2017) 149 final}, 4.5.2017 SWD(2017) 148 final, in turn, underlines, there are currently no requirements for TRs to make data reported on their behalf available to counterparties.

In the ESMA opinion, it was not an original objective of EMIR to provide granular aggregate position data to the public. However, also ESMA considers that the trade repositories are in a privileged position to provide the most comprehensive derivatives data aggregation in the EUropean Union.

The follow-up of the above observations is the proposition for the respective TRs' data transparency framework set out in the Final Report, Draft technical standards on data to be made publicly available by TRs under Article 81 of EMIR, 10 July 2017, ESMA70-151-370.

All in all, the above considerations need to take into account that each individual trade repository may only hold partial information on an entity’s exposure with respect to any product and each of its counterparties.  Hence, TRs can only calculate a partial TR-level position for any entity (Consultation Paper ESMA’s Guidelines on position calculation under EMIR, 17 November 2017, ESMA70-151-819, 8).

The possibility for reporting counterparties to report their various trades to diverse TRs poses a particular challenge for the establishment of a set of entity-level positions that is consistent, complete and coherent across entities and derivatives.

 

Enforcement

 

In 2016, ESMA adopted its first enforcement decision against a trade repository. In March 2016, the ESMA Board of Supervisors issued a public notice in respect of the infringements found to have been committed by DTCC Derivatives Repository Limited and imposed a fine of €64,000 for negligently failing to put in place systems capable of providing regulators with direct and immediate access to derivatives trading data (ESMA's report of 3 February 2017, p. 9). In turn, on 24 March 2022 ESMA fined Regis-TR €186 000 for EMIR data breaches.

  

Perspectives for the trade repositories' legal framework

 

EFET and EURELECTRIC in the document Joint EFET-EURELECTRIC response of 1 February 2016 to ESMA consultation on draft technical standards on access to data and aggregation and comparison of TR data across TR under Article 81 of EMIR urged ESMA to consider the following:

1. Ensure TRs implement, as a matter of urgency, effective interoperability arrangements – no TRs have full and effective interoperability arrangements in place. Therefore, it is very difficult for market participants to ensure that transactions that have been reported have been matched with those reported by counterparts.

2. Ensure TRs establish minimum standards and time-frames for portability of client accounts – this will facilitate greater competition amongst TRs and hopefully will lead to better service standards;

3. Ensure minimum service standards are in place for TR clients to readily access transaction data for reporting validation purposes – this could include ensuring that TR data is more searchable and that TRs provide basic transaction classification information on reporting breaches (i.e. identify proactively any transactions not reported in the D+1 timeframe). This will facilitate timely rectification of reporting breaches by market participants;

4. Ensure the confidentiality at any time of all transactional data reported to the TRs - Any unauthorised access to these data by non-competent persons may impact materially the commercial and competitive position of market participants. Also the operational security of the IT systems used for transmitting, receiving and storing these data must be ensured. EFET and EURELECTRIC welcome further information on how the TRs will guarantee the confidentiality and protection of these data.

Some recent changes in the political, competitive, regulatory and technological landscape that are likely to further influence the trade repositories industry are:
1. the expected guidance on portability, clarifying how clients can migrate from one TR to another, is expected to trigger more movement of TR clients,
2. TRs expand their commercial offerings for reporting services related to wholesale energy market under REMIT and SFTR.

Another opportunity for TRs is the provision of multi-jurisdictional reporting services, as new jurisdictions are starting to introduce legal frameworks similar to EMIR. The aforementioned ESMA's report of 3 February 2017 refers in that regard to the Switzerland's example, where the Financial Markets Infrastructure Act was adopted in 2015 and came into force as of 1st of January 2016 (the transaction reporting obligation started 6 months after the registration or recognition of the first TR in Switzerland and may trigger EU registered TRs to expand their offerings to the Swiss market).

The European Commission Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 as regards the clearing obligation, the suspension of the clearing obligation, the reporting requirements, the risk-mitigation techniques for OTC derivatives contracts not cleared by a central counterparty, the registration and supervision of trade repositories and the requirements for trade repositories (COM(2017)208) of May 2017 envisions important modifications with respect to trade repositories' legal framework.

Recital 23 of the said draft Regulation reads:

"In terms of the services provided by trade repositories, Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 has established a competitive environment. Counterparties should therefore be able to choose the trade repository to which they wish to report and should be able to switch trade repositories if they so choose. To facilitate that switch and to ensure the continued availability of data without duplication, trade repositories should establish appropriate policies to ensure the orderly transfer of reported data to other trade repositories where requested by an undertaking subject to the reporting obligation."

 

 

New

  

EMIR reform propositions

impact on trade repositories

May 2017

 

 

according to the Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 as regards the clearing obligation, the suspension of the clearing obligation, the reporting requirements, the risk-mitigation techniques for OTC derivatives contracts not cleared by a central counterparty, the registration and supervision of trade repositories and the requirements for trade repositories, COM(2017)208, May 2017, IP/17/1150, 4 May 2017

 

   

 

numbering blue.  Trade repositories explicitly required to implement procedures to verify the completeness and the accuracy of the data reported to them

 

 

numbering blue   Trade repositories required to establish procedures for reconciling (i.e. cross-checking and comparing) data with other trade repositories in cases where the other counterparty reported their side of the transaction to a different trade repository

 

 

numbering blue   Trade repositories required to allow counterparties which delegated reporting to another entity to view the data which was reported on their behalf

 

 

numbering blue   Trade repositories required to create procedures ensuring the orderly transfer of data to another trade repository following requests from customers wishing to change the trade repository to which they report their transactions

 

 

numbering blue   The scope of the technical standards on reporting which ESMA can develop expanded to allow further harmonisation of reporting rules and specification of the details of the new requirements for trade repositories

 

 

  

Subscribe to read more …