European trade repositories focus on standardising data and reconciling trades between them after launching trade reporting in the region last week.

The European Securities and Markets Authority authorised six trade repositories last year with a deadline for reporting of both exchange-traded and over-the-counter derivatives to start on February 12. Counterparties using an approved trade repository meet their reporting obligations under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation.

IntercontinentalExchange said in a statement that on the first day of trade reporting ICE Trade Vault Europe processed approximately 4.5 million trades for more than 300 market participants, which was a combination of backloading historical deals and new trades

Bruce Tupper, president of ICE Trade Vault, told Markets Media: “Our staff worked about 20 hours a day between London and the US setting up clients during the days leading up to the launch.”

For exchange-traded data, counterparties can either report deals directly to a trade repository or delegate reporting to a third party such as a broker or clearer. For example, both ICE Futures Europe and ICE Clear Europe offer delegated reporting services.”

“We were pleasantly surprised by the number of participants who opted to use these services,” added Tupper.  “Looking ahead, we will be reviewing the recent ESMA Q&A and reconciling data among trade repositories.”

ESMA issued an updated Q&A on trade reporting the day on February 11 covering areas such as how to construct Unique Trade Identifiers and how to report empty or unavailable data fields.

On February 14 ESMA also sent a a letter to the European Commission asking for clarification of the definition of a derivative under EMIR as this is not harmonised across the European Union.

ESMA said in the letter: “This is particularly the case for foreign exchange forwards and physically settled commodity forwards.”

Mark Husler, chief executive of Univista, part of the London Stock Exchange Group, told Markets Media: “A lot of our larger volume clients were ready to go live ahead of February 12 and although it has only been a couple of days the launch of reporting has been a success from a UnaVista perspective.”

UnaVista had reported 10 million trades for over 2,500 counterparties with a total notional value of €360 trillion by midday on February 14 with counterparties either reporting directly or using its partial or delegated reporting service. Michael Davie, chief executive of LCH.Clearnet, which operates SwapClear, said in a statement that the interest rate swap clearer had backloaded more than 5.8 million trades before the deadline through UnaVista.

“Over the coming months we will be working closely with ESMA and the other repositories to move towards standardisation,” added Husler. “Without this it is difficult to deliver reporting across Europe and support new clients who have not yet started reporting. We have also allocated 17,000 LEIs over the last few months but we are expecting lots of new requests to be made.”

Legal Entity Identifiers are part of a global reference data system that aims to uniquely identify every legal entity or structure, in any jurisdiction, that is party to a financial transaction.

This week Hellenic Exchanges Group said in a statement that it has chosen UnaVista to provide a delegated reporting service under EMIR and to allocate LEIs for the Greek market.

HELEX will use UnaVista’s delegated reporting service for all Greek derivatives trades on behalf of 3,000 counterparties its 33 member firms will use the UnaVista Rules Engine to gather data from up to 32,800 market participants and convert it into the format specified by the regulator for submission to a trade repository.

Dimitris Karaiskakis, chief operating officer of Hellenic Exchanges, said in a statement: “It was imperative to Hellenic Exchanges that we could provide one solution to wholly cover the reporting aspect of the EMIR regulation while being efficient and compatible with our highly diverse market members.”