UnaVista, the London Stock Exchange’s hosted matching, reconciliation and data integration service, has been granted approved reporting mechanism (ARM) status by UK regulator the Financial Services Authority (FSA).
Using its ARM status, UnaVista will be able to offer sell-side firms validation tools to monitor the quality of their transaction reports, as well as the basic data validation services required under MiFID.
Transaction reports are sent to regulators on a T+1 basis to detect market abuse and include details of trading activity such as details of the product traded, the firm that undertook the trade, the trade counterparty and other trade characteristics such as buy/sell identifier, price and quantity.
According to the London Stock Exchange (LSE), using UnaVista will reduce the risks of supplying the FSA with incorrect data. The service will allow customers to facilitate the management of exceptions highlighted by validation, monitor trends to discover recurrent issues, apply additional validations on top of those mandated by the FSA and accept data in a variety of formats, thereby eliminating the need to use middleware to transform data in FSA standard formats.
“This new service will offer UnaVista’s clients a functionally rich and flexible approach to transaction reporting,” commented Kevin Milne, director of post-trade services at the LSE Group. “With UnaVista exceeding the level of validation mandated by regulators, firms using our transaction reporting service will be able to reduce the risks and costs associated with incorrect, late or duplicate reporting.”
The LSE’s existing ARM, Exchange Reporting Service, has been migrated onto the UnaVista platform to give member firms a wider range of interface choices and improved validation functionality.
In the last couple of the months, the FSA has clamped down on non-compliant transaction reporting. In April, the regulator fined Credit Suisse, GETCO and Instinet a total of £4.2 million for a series of transaction reporting failings stretching back to 2007 and spanning over 110 million transactions. Later that month, the FSA charged the London branch of German bank Commerzbank £595,000 after repeated problems with the firm’s Mitre transaction reporting system.