ESMA have today published their proposed changes to the Technical Standards around trade reporting under EMIR, which can be found here. It will be submitted to the European Commission who have three months to approve it, after which the European Parliament and Council have a period during which they can object. The new TS includes new fields, changes to current fields and other clarifications. A full analysis will be published in due course. The proposed changes are based on a consultation that ESMA ran at the end of last year.

The changes are published less than two weeks after the EMIR “Level II Validations” came into force, which tightened up the allowed values in the existing fields. These will therefore be the third set of changes to be implemented since EMIR went live on 12 February 2014. The constant changes, and also new rule sets, such as REMIT and MiFID will occupy those in trade and data reporting for some time.

An application to run a  new EMIR Trade Repository has also been announced by Abide Financial, with a press release that can be found here. Once approved and taken live, Abide Financial will run the seventh approved TR in Europe.

In related news, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) have also published a report on the progress of G20 financial reforms, including derivative reforms, which can be found here. Amongst other things, the report highlights the fact that while most, but not all,  jurisdictions have now started collecting trade data, there are data quality issues because of the different data formats in use. (See page 26 Box 4). Hopefully the new EMIR Technical Standards, when implemented, will go some way to addressing these, at least within the EU.