The European Securities and Markets Authority’s (ESMA) annual report and work programme has been prepared according to Article 21 of Regulation 1060/2009 on credit rating agencies as amended (the CRA Regulation) and Article 85 of Regulation 648/2012 on OTC derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories (EMIR). It highlights the direct supervisory activities carried out by ESMA during 2015 regarding credit rating agencies (CRAs) and trade repositories (TRs) and outlines ESMA’s main priorities in these areas for 2016.

ESMA adopts a risk-based approach to the supervision of CRAs and TRs in accordance with its overall objectives of promoting financial stability and orderly markets and enhancing investor protection. This risk-based approach requires the analysis of information from a variety of sources and the application of multiple supervisory tools including day-to-day supervision, cycle of engagement meetings with supervised entities, on-site inspections and dedicated investigations.

In order to build on the expertise that ESMA has developed through its supervision of CRAs and TRs, ESMA created a single Supervision Department in November 2015. ESMA intends to draw on the best practices identified from the supervision of both types of entity to further enhance its supervisory effectiveness in future.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) is publishing this Consultation Paper as part of its consultations on Level 2 measures under the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) as well as certain amendments to the Level 2 measures under EMIR in order to take into account legal developments as well as to ensure consistency, where relevant, between the frameworks of both regulations

Contents

Section 1 is the executive summary of the document. Section 2 explains the background to our proposals. Section 3 includes detailed information on the procedure and criteria for registration as TR under SFTR. Section 4 details the use of internationally agreed reporting standards, the reporting logic under SFTR and the main aspects of the structure of an SFT report. Section 5 covers the requirements regarding transparency of data and aggregation and comparison of data. Section 6 details the access levels of authorities. Section 7 contains the tables of fields, for the relevant types of SFTs, as well as a summary of all the questions.

Next Steps

ESMA will consider the feedback it received to this document in the fourth quarter of 2016. The final report and the draft technical standards will be submitted to the European Commission for endorsement by the end of Q1/beginning Q2 2017.