The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced that 138 clients have signed up to adopt and more than 30 vendors have partnered with its Global Trade Repository (GTR) service in order to meet their regulatory obligations under the forthcoming European Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR).
SFTR is expected to take effect for banks and broker-dealers in April, for exchanges and CCPs in July, and for buy-side firms in October this year, followed by non-financial counterparties in January 2021. The GTR service is offered by DTCC’s Repository and Derivatives (RDS) division.
DTCC opened industry-wide user-acceptance testing (UAT) for SFTR last October so that clients could benefit from an extended period of testing, increasing their levels of preparedness for regulatory compliance on day one. Since then, additional phases have rolled out including UAT with final XML schemas and validations rules.
Identifying reporting obligations for derivatives and securities financing transactions as top priorities for DTCC, Chris Childs, managing director, head of RDS, DTCC and CEO & president, DTCC Deriv/SERV LLC, said in a statement that in 2019, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, SEB and Societe Generale signed up, with buy-side being added recently including Citadel, Franklin Templeton, Nordea Investment Management and PIMCO.
“There are now only two months to go until the implementation of SFTR begins for the broker-dealer community and eight months until the compliance date for the buy-side,” said Val Wotton, managing director, Product Development & Strategy, RDS at DTCC. “Broker-dealers have made good progress in their readiness for SFTR implementation and our goal is to help support asset managers as they look to do the same. We’re ready to assist them as they prepare for this new mandate.”