An Association of Corporate Treasurers webinar today entitled ‘EMIR and beyond - where now’ with talks from S&P Capital IQ - the sponsors, Hatstand and John Doyle, Deputy Treasury Controller, SABMiller revealed important features of the evolving regulatory reporting environment plus some useful tips and opportunities:

• be aware that UTI’s which are more than 15 digits are truncated to 15 by Excel
• even now, don’t underestimate the work involved in becoming and remaining EMIR compliant
• understand the particular requirements of your Trade Repository as they are all slightly different, particularly in the uploading process
• document your assumptions given ‘there is a lack of certainty in some areas’, it is prudent to record what you did and why
• if you can, automate wherever possible, to reduce the time and resources EMIR can absorb
• don’t forget that EMIR came out of a G20 meeting, so there will be further similar legislation come around the world, e.g. Australia working in their Dodd-Franck regulations, AND non-G20 countries, e.g. Hong Kong and Singapore, are developing their version of EMIR
• remember EMIR has impacts outside of Europe, e.g. need to understand the impact on a non-European subsidiary that deals with a EU bank 
• the regulations are likely to change, e.g. how will the definition of a derivative change?, and how will standard practices change
• although many corporates will be below the mandatory reporting, the new regulations will affect everyone in several ways, and central Trade Repository(TR) reporting could be important for many more corporates than are considering it at the moment
• increasingly collateral will be required for derivative trades
• opportunity: give the portfolio reconciliation data from EMIR to your auditors, so they don’t have to collect the data themselves, and, possibly, get your audit fees reduced
• opportunity: the LEI code management and other services from the TRs provide can be used in many ways to improve other corporate treasury processes, not just EMIR reporting. (CTMfile: more on this later.)

(A poll on the corporate attendees’ state of progress in implementing EMIR reporting showed that: only 8% had hardly started; 19% have agreed plan and have taken first steps; 22% have all appointments/agreements in place and are testing; 30% are fully operational but still have backlog of data; and 22% are fully operational and up to date.)