As part of its Data Strategy and its contribution to simplification and burden reduction, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, launched today a call for evidence to gather feedback on opportunities to simplify, better integrate and streamline supervisory reporting.
ESMA aims to identify how best to enhance efficiency and reduce the costs associated with supervisory reporting, whilst maintaining a strong level of transparency and ensuring effective oversight from the authorities.
Verena Ross, ESMA’s Chair, said:
“As part of ESMA’s broader burden reduction efforts, we want to streamline the transaction reporting framework, which we know constitutes a significant cost for market participants. ESMA is launching today a call for evidence to identify ways to rationalise data flows, harmonise processes and eliminate duplicative or inconsistent requirements.
The time is right to look at reporting frameworks in a more comprehensive manner and present options to achieve simplification and burden reduction. The goal is to reduce complexity and costs for stakeholders while enhancing data quality, sharing and usability. Your input is important – please engage with ESMA to help us identify the changes needed to move forward.”
The call for evidence highlights some of the issues previously raised by market participants in their responses to consultations and interactions with regulators. These issues include the overlapping obligations across different reporting regimes (MiFIR, EMIR, SFTR, etc.), the duplicative reporting channels, and the burdens created by frequent and unsynchronised regulatory changes.
Considering this feedback, the document presents two options for simplification, on which ESMA would welcome input:
- eliminating overlaps without any change to the current reporting channels; or
- creating a unified reporting template based on the ‘report once’ principle to replace multiple reporting frameworks.
While the consultation and the analysis of the feedback received is conducted, ESMA will not propose changes to the existing reporting frameworks on transaction reports (RTS 22), order data (RTS 24) and reference data (RTS 23) under the ongoing MiFIR Review. ESMA is instead publishing final reports summarising the feedback received from market participants to the consultations on the review of MIFIR transaction, order book and reference data reporting.
Putting on hold the RTS changes will allow market participants to freeze their implementation efforts, already contributing to burden reduction by avoiding implementation cost in the short term. The rest of the MIFIR Review will go ahead as planned.
Next steps
All interested parties can submit their contributions by 19 September. Additionally, ESMA will reach out to different stakeholder groups to assess the implementation challenges that the different options entail in practice and gather further feedback on key drivers of cost.
Based on the feedback received, ESMA will publish a final report by the beginning of 2026, which will include the identification of key cost drivers of supervisory reporting and outline the proposed way forward.
Further information:
Cristina Bonillo
Senior Communications Officer
press@esma.europa.eu
