The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published (on 15 February) their annual report on its direct supervisory activities in 2014 regarding credit rating agencies (CRAs) and trade repositories (TR). 

Credit Rating Agencies

Progress: ESMA is now responsible for overseeing the activities of 27 registered and certified CRAs in the EU. As part of its supervisory work in 2014 ESMA concluded its investigation into the issue of structured finance ratings, completed a review of small and medium-sized CRAs and conducted work regarding sovereign ratings. In addition, ESMA issued its first enforcement decision under the CRA Regulation in respect of internal control failings.

ESMA’s key priorities for 2015-2016 are to tackle the systemic risks posed by CRAs by seeking to minimise conflicts of interest in the rating process and will focus on the following issues CRA’s:

• governance, risk management and internal decision making processes;
• business development processes.

ESMA will continue a number of major investigations during 2015-16, including investigations into the review and validation of ratings methodologies and into IT internal controls and information security. 

ESMA will also follow up on recently concluded investigations regarding Structured Finance and SMEs in order to ensure the effective implementation of the remedial action plans.

Trade Repositories

Progress: Since February 2014 when derivatives reporting started, a total of almost 10 billion reports have been received and processed by the six registered TRs while the number of entities which have direct reporting agreements with TRs is now nearly 5,000. As of early January 2015, around 300 million derivative trade reports are being submitted on a weekly basis. 

Following some problems (!!!) at the start of trade reporting, as with any major new reporting system, ESMA’s supervisory focus has now shifted to the quality of the reported data and to ensuring appropriate data access by regulators, taking into account the scale and complexity of TR systems and of the data now flowing into them.

Key ESMA priorities: In 2014 ESMA has identified a number of risks and issues regarding data quality; on-boarding and access to data by authorities; systems performance and operation; and confidentiality of data. While measures and action plans were developed and applied in 2014, considering the scale of the work this is expected to continue well into 2015. 

In terms of thematic reviews and investigations, these will be carried out on the following issues across all TRs:

• inter-TR reconciliation process;
• business continuity planning; and
• cost relatedness of fees.

Finally, a number of individual reviews and investigations will focus on TR systems software development lifecycle, data availability and regulators’ access to TRs and the confidentiality of TR data.

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Steven Maijoor, ESMA Chair, said (after some warm words on ESMA’s role and progress), “ESMA will continue to exercise its direct supervisory powers in 2015 through on-going supervision and investigations as well as through complaints handling and enforcement work.”

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CTMfile take: The annual report shows that ESMA understand what are the main problems to be solved in CRAs and TRs. They’ll need good luck and hopefully they will be able to expand their team because they are desperately under-staffed.