On 11 December 2015, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published a consultation paper which proposes to enhance the current functionalities offered by trade repositories (TRs) for data access under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR).

ESMA thinks that the current rules for TR access should be significantly improved as currently, the comparability of data is not sufficient.

In order to further improve the quality of data reported under EMIR, ESMA proposes amendments to the current rules in order to ensure direct and immediate access to data by national competent authorities (NCAs) and to facilitate the aggregation and comparison of data across trade repositories.

The proposed improvements refer to the following aspects:

• standardised output format of the TR data, based on international ISO standards, allowing better comparison and aggregation of data across repositories;
• minimum types of data queries that need to be available for the authorities;
• standardised and secure data exchange, based on ISO standards, between TRs and NCAs;
• standard frequencies for the provision of direct and immediate access to TR data.
• secure machine-to-machine connection and use of data encryption protocols.

ESMA seeks stakeholders' feedback on it’s proposed amendments by 1 February 2016.

ESMA’s new IT Hub which is currently under development will support all the proposed functionalities.

For further information please see here.