Abide Financial have announced that they will act as the Registered Reporting Mechanism(RRM) under REMIT for ICAP customers. The press release is here.

According to the press release, the arrangement allows ICAP to fulfil their obligation under the REMIT Implementing Act as an Organised Market Place (OMP), which requires them to “offer a data reporting agreement” to report any data which arises from the platform.

In addition, a facility will be provided for post trade events arising from those trade to be reported. This addresses one of the issues which could be faced with “OMP” reporting, i.e. the reporting of modifications and early terminations of trades which are executed on a broker platform. Since the post trade events usually occur bilaterally, the OMP is not in a position to report them, nor are they obligated to. In the case of ICAP/Abide, a facility is being provided to report such events. The offering also attempt to address the issue of the beneficiary ID not being known by the OMP, as well as reconciliation. A fuller description of the service can be found in the FAQ document here.

With four and a half months to go until the first go live on the 7th October 2015, there are still many unknowns around how “OMP reporting” will work, in several respects:

• Most “OMP offerings” are not yet finalised, with the actual offering and the pricing still not set in many cases (although we can expect some announcements very soon, and this one from Abide makes things clearer for some).
• Many of the different RRM offerings are not final, in terms of both pricing and how they will work.
• Those who wish to report data directly to an RRM (instead of using the OMP) face a distinct lack of information from ACER, for example on how to properly handle third party delegation. The TRUM (Trade Reporting User Manual) on the ACER website is still the first version, and this is unlikely to be the final one.

The next few weeks may finally see the announcements being made that will permit market participants to work out how to comply. At the moment the landscape is rather confusing.