ESMA have recently announced their intention(in this press release) to undertake two projects to centralise data under EMIR and MiFID:

• The Instrument Reference Data project – to centralise data related to financial instruments traded of regulated markets (e.g. exchanges).
• The Trade Repositories Project – To centralise the data that is being collected via the six TRs under EMIR.

The ability of regulators to see data centrally, thereby drawing useful conclusions on systemic risk, has always been an objective of EMIR and the reason for collecting the data in the first place. EMIR has been plagued with issues around data quality. The  recent consultation on this issue will soon result in updated Regulatory Technical Standards that will hopefully sharpen some of the data, and perhaps increase reconciliation rates.

Unless the data quality improves, there is little point in centralising it, as Maria Leontiou points out in this article on The OTC Space.  This is especially challenging in the energy and commodities world, where data can be complex and the definition of the fields for EMIR so far has been hard to standardise.

While these projects will push us on the way to the data being more readable, there still remains work to be done in terms of coming up with an agreed standard for representing commodity trades.