The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has issued today a consultation paper on draft technical standards implementing the Securities Financing Transaction Regulation (SFTR), which aims to increase the transparency of shadow banking activities. Securities financing transactions (SFTs) are transactions where securities are used to borrow cash (or other higher investment-grade securities), or vice versa – this includes repurchase transactions, securities lending and sell/buy-back transactions.

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.