ECSDA answers ESMA on settlement fails reporting
The European Central Securities Depository Association (ECSDA) welcomes the issuance of this Consultation Paper on the guidelines of Fails reporting under Article 7(1).
As we share the need of addressing some discrepancies and pitfalls in the fails reporting, we thank ESMA for having taken this initiative of harmonising the fails reporting requirements. Beyond the mere purposes of the settlement fails reporting, the proposed guidelines also influence certain provisions related to settlement discipline measures.
We would like to use the opportunity of the consultation:
1. to provide feedback on the most important aspects of the regulatory reporting, as well as
2. to stress the relevance of some issues, which are not tackled in the consultation paper.
Main points on the regulatory reporting:
I. We would generally advise to carefully balance costs vs. benefits of the reporting and limit the granularity of the information to what is fundamentally necessary for further actions of competent authorities.
II. We stress the fundamental importance of having more clarity on the instrument and instruction scope of the fails reporting, as well as the scope of other settlement discipline measures.
III. We believe that the scope of the requirements should be limited to transactions in financial instruments which the parties settle in an EU CSD. Hence, transactions where the actual place of settlement is outside of an EU CSD should be considered as out of scope of the reporting by EU (Investor-)CSDs.
IV. We would kindly ask for providing the definition of the ISO 20022 or XML message (draft) format to be used for reporting, as soon as possible and ahead of the issuance of the final version of these guidelines. Else, we fear that the timely compliance with the guidelines would be at risk.