Finma, the Swiss financial regulator, has announced that the start of reporting for the smallest non financial entities caught by the Financial Markets Infrastructure Act (also known as “Finfrag”) will be delayed by nine months, to the 1st January 2019. The announcement can be found here.

The first group of counterparties, larger financial counterparties (FC+) started to report on 2nd October 2017  to one of the two authorised Trade Repositories, Six or Regis-TR (see here). Smaller financial counterparties (FC-) and larger non financial counterparties(NFC+) are still to start at the beginning of next year.  It is the smaller non financial entities (NFC-) for whom the start has been delayed from 1st April 2018 to 1st January 2019. There is also a delay of six months for the reporting of certain on venue contracts.

The reporting elements of Finfrag have many similarities with EMIR and other rules which meet the aspirations of the 2009 G20 declaration. However, Finfrag adopts a “one sided reporting” approach, where only one of the parties of the trade sends data to a trade repository. The party that must report is generally the larger one in the hierarchy, in the event that both are Swiss. Given that in many cases trades between Swiss NFC- counterparties are not reportable, the scope for such entities is small. However, for many such NFC-s, there is still data to report, which often relates to cross border trades.