EMIR REFIT – The story so far.
The EMIR Refit, which amends the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), went live across the EU on 29 April 2024.
The Refit represents a significant change to the EMIR transaction reporting standard, with an expansion of the number of reportable fields from 129 to 203, harmonisation of messaging formats and standards, and more explicit guidance from regulators on data quality expectations.
Regulators have taken a much firmer stance with the EMIR Refit, making it clear that they expect firms to have their reporting ready to go on day one.
To quote the opening pre-amble for the EMIR Refit in Official Journal of the European Union and in the technical standards which accompanied it…
“The reporting of complete and accurate details of derivatives, including the indication of the business events triggering the changes to the derivatives, is essential to ensure that the derivative data can be effectively used”
“In order to properly monitor concentration of exposures and systemic risk, it is crucial to ensure that complete and accurate information on exposure and collateral exchanged between two counterparties is submitted to trade repositories”
“Information relating to the pricing of the derivatives should be reported consistently and thus allow competent authorities to verify the reported exposures, evaluate costs and liquidity in the derivatives markets”
“Reconciliation breaks are a clear indication of potential problems with the quality of the reported data. Therefore, the counterparties, the entities responsible for reporting and the report submitting entities, as applicable, should have in place arrangements to ensure that the reconciliation failures are resolved”
As you can see there’s a strong emphasis on ensuring complete, accurate and timely reporting, as well as effective reconciliation between counterparties.
So what does all this mean? Well, in short:
Buy side participants and their Management Companies can no longer “delegate and forget” their EMIR transaction reporting obligations to their sell-side counterparts. They need to be actively monitoring their reporting and addressing issues rapidly and engaging their regulators with credible remediation plans when they do identify issues.
Trade Repositories are increasingly mandated to focus on data quality and consistency, and the submission validations are much more onerous.
Submitting firms will be expected to double down on their efforts to ensure the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of their reporting and will be expected to improve cross-industry dialogue to support error resolution.
So how have we all done so far? Well, the short answer is that it’s been a mixed bag and not dissimilar to previous Trade and Transaction Reporting implementations. Here’s the latest from our team on the ground who have been working closely with our buy-side, sell-side and TR partners to support the Refit.
- Pre-Go Live Testing was a big challenge. Submitting firms have struggled with a time crunch with getting their Refit reporting fully end to end tested. Here at Novatus Global we have worked with many clients to support their testing efforts against the new standards, to provide extra comfort that their reports would pass the updated validation rules imposed by TR’s
- Participants have suffered from unstable System and User testing environments whilst some end points are saying that participants have not left themselves enough time to test and have left it until the last minute.
- Moving targets on the reporting requirements throughout the reporting lifecycle have led to a rush of last minute changes and retesting, with limited success.
- Firms are struggling to get their data submitted to repositories due to a combination of in-house tech issues and challenges in submitting to Trade Repositories.
So it’s clear to see that the implementation of the EMIR Refit has been challenging so far and overall the market sentiment is that these issues will not be resolved quickly, and firms will need to double down on their efforts to ensure data quality and improve cross-industry collaboration to support error resolution and reconciliation.
There are very clear indicators that regulators are not going to let up on data quality – The Lux regulator, the CSSF, recently published its own guidance outlining the Data Quality Indicators (“DQIs”) that it will be focussed on in the post Refit world and we expect similar guidance from other regulators to follow.
Novatus Global are in a unique position to assist with the current EMIR go-live adding much needed clarity to your reporting status. Our En:ACT platform allows you to perform comprehensive reconciliations on:
- EMIR Submission files sent to Trade repositories.
- Source data held within OMSs against what was reported to the trade repository.
- The En:ACT platform’s Compliance Rules Engine runs thousands of tests across 100% of trades and 100% of fields, covering all the changes to the G20 regulations including EMIR. This is maintained an in-house team of specialists to ensure they are up to date at all times.
- Out of the box analytics, MI and reports enable you to quickly ascertain the root cause of issues and demonstrate effective governance.
- In built workflow capabilities enable tracking of issues from identification to closure.
You can be setup within 24 hours of contacting us and you can start reviewing your activity leading to a demonstrable oversight of the Accuracy, Completeness and Timeliness of your reporting.
