Following the passing of the European Parliament and Council Regulation on Credit Rating Agencies (EC 1060/2009) at the end of last year, the Committee of European Securities Regulators (CESR) has been charged with setting in place a new reporting regime for ratings agencies to provide information on the historical performance of their credit ratings issued to the regulator, which will then be published in a central repository. In order to effectively communicate these new requirements to the ratings agency sector, CESR has organised a one day seminar on reporting instructions for agencies applying for registration in the EU on 9 September 2010 at its Paris premises in France.
According to CESR, the seminar will improve credit rating agencies’ understanding of how to technically comply with the reporting requirements to the central repository, which has been dubbed CEREP. The free seminar is aimed therefore at individuals in these firms that have been placed in charge of the technical implementation of their CEREP reporting projects. Those wishing to attend should contact cra@cesr.eu by 23 August 2010 at the latest.
A CESR expert group was established in November 2008 to assist in preparing CESR for these new tasks relating to credit ratings agencies. The group, which has now been turned into a standing committee, produced a consultation document back at the end of May detailing the data requirements for these agencies, including an example of a typical set of information that they will need to provide on an ongoing basis.
CESR is being rather prescriptive about the data it is requiring these firms to provide to their national regulators in order to ensure that full transparency is achieved. It is also mandating on site visits by home and host regulators to these individual firms in order to ensure they are kept in line and living up to their purported risk and data management practices.
The requirements overall entail a fair amount of data management system restructuring internally within these credit ratings agencies in order to be able to store and retrieve at will the prescribed sets of information for reporting purposes.
To find out more about the standing committee’s work, check out the CESR website here.
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