European Securities and Markets Authority Publishes Guidelines on Reporting Securities Financing Transactions

The European Securities and Markets Authority has published guidelines on the reporting obligations under the EU Securities Financing Transactions Regulation. SFTs involve the use of securities to borrow cash or other higher investment-grade securities, or vice versa. Such transactions can include repurchase transactions, securities lending and sell/buy backs. The reporting obligation applies from January 11, 2021 for Non-Financial Counterparties. It has applied since July 13, 2020 for banks and investment firms (delayed from April 13, 2020 due to COVID-19), CCPs and central securities depositories and from October 12, 2020 for other Financial Counterparties.

The guidelines will apply to counterparties to SFTs, trade repositories and relevant EU financial regulators from the day after publication or the day from which the relevant obligation applies.

The guidelines cover:

• the reporting start date when it falls on a non-working day;
• the number of reportable SFTs;
• the population of reporting fields for different types of SFTs, for margin data and for reuse, reinvestment and funding sources data;
• the approach used to link SFT collateral with SFT loans;
• the generation of feedback by trade repositories and its subsequent management by counterparties, in the case of rejection of reported data and reconciliation breaks; and
• the provision of access to data to authorities by trade repositories.

View the guidelines on reporting under SFTR.

View details of the delays to SFTR reporting due to COVID-19.

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