Endorsement is one of two regimes provided in the CRA Regulation that allow credit ratings issued in a third country to be used for regulatory purposes in the EU – the other being equivalence/certification. Article 21(3) of the CRA Regulation requires ESMA to issue and update guidelines on the application of the endorsement regime specified under Article 4(3) of the same Regulation. This Consultation Paper proposes to update the previously issued 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement.
The proposed update of the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement is mainly driven by the need to reflect the changes to Articles 6-12 and Annex I introduced by CRA 3, which will enter into force for the purposes of equivalence and endorsement on 1 June 2018. On that basis, ESMA has to update the Methodological Framework on which ESMA relies for assessing a third-country legal and supervisory framework for the purposes of endorsement and equivalence. This Methodological Framework is provided in Annex II of the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement. By 1 June 2018, ESMA should also have completed a reassessment of all the previously assessed third-country legal and regulatory frameworks against the new requirements based on the updated Methodological Framework (provided in Annex III).

ESMA has taken this opportunity to reassess its approach to endorsement more broadly, based on the supervisory experience acquired since the adoption of the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement. The proposed changes and clarification of the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement focus in particular on ESMA’s understanding of points (b), (c), (d), and (e) of Article 4(3) of the CRA Regulation.
Furthermore, some parts of the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement relate to the establishment of ESMA, the initial registration of CRAs and various transitional arrangements. The proposed updated Guidelines on Endorsement do not include these parts, as they are no longer relevant. Finally, some information in the 2011 Guidelines on Endorsement was not addressed to market participants but referred to ESMA’s internal processes. This information has also been excluded from the proposed updated guidelines on Endorsement, but is, for context, summarised in Section 4 of this Consultation Paper.
 

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.