On 5th April 2016, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published amended regulatory technical standards (RTS) implementing the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR).

The amended RTS deal with the access, aggregation and comparison of data across trade repositories.

In order to ensure higher quality of data and to enhance the access to data by authorities and allow for the comparability and aggregation of data across trade repositories, ESMA proposes the following amendments to its RTS:

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

ESMA is aligning the implementation date of the amended RTS with the implementation date of the amended reporting rules under Article 9 EMIR which were submitted to the EC on 13 November 2015.