We are now in the second week of REMIT reporting, which kicked off last Wednesday. Friday saw the release of this statement from ACER (reproduced on the MondoVisione site). The statement talks about a large volume of data, and the fact that there have been a few technical difficulties, especially around the issue of generation of receipts (that is, the ARIS system’s response to messages sent to it). There have been reports of other teething troubles too.

ACER makes the differentiation between “technical difficulties” and “breaches of REMIT”. From a market participant perspective, compliance with the first phase of REMIT often involves the satisfactory signing of a data reporting agreement with the Organised Market Place (although the liability transfer will depend on the wording of the agreement). The REMIT Implementing Act, Article 11(2) generally delegates responsibility of reporting to “third parties” (once they have the data, if it needs to be transferred). However, market participants are required to  “take reasonable steps to verify the completeness, accuracy and timeliness of the data“. This needs to be borne in mind when deciding whether any failure is in fact a technical issue, or a breach.

Hopefully things will settle down over the coming week, at which point focus will turn to the next reporting deadline on the 7th April, which covers off venue activity. The amount of work required to comply with this deadline should not be under estimated. On top of that, now is a good time to strat digesting the implications of the final draft of the MiFID II/MiFIR RTS.