CICI Utility Goes Live in Preparation for CFTC’s October OTC Reporting Rule

The initial implementation of the DTCC’s and Swift’s CICI Utility Portal has gone live at https://ciciutility.org. The release of the site – which aims to support Phase 1 of global assignment of the CFTC’s Interim Compliant Identifiers by providing timely and accurate entity records – comes a month after the DTCC and Swift were named by CFTC to provide CICIs for legal entities involved in OTC derivatives trading.

According to statement on the site, the CICI Utility draws upon “DTCC/Avox’s knowledge of global entity validation and Swift’s capabilities as an existing ISO registration authority.” Avox released its own – entirely separate – AvoxData utility offering access to entity identifiers last week].

The portal supports a number of functions that will aid in the registration and management of CICIs by industry participants:

· Self-registration by the entities themselves;

· Third-party registration of entities by financial institutions, trade repositories, vendors and other intermediaries;

· Assignment, within minutes, of CICIs to self-registered and third-party registered entities (and assignment of the final ISO 17442 standard once it’s finalised);

· Self-certification by the entities of information entered about them by third parties;

· Real-time availability of CICIs and their corresponding legal entity data within the CICI Utility database after CICIs are assigned;

· Web-based, database search capability;

· Credit card processing through selected providers for registration/certification fee payment;

· A download capability of the full CICI database and a database of daily changes via industry standard interfaces once per day.

The CICI is designed to be an identifier for all legal entities dealing in OTC derivatives falling under CFTC jurisdiction until an international programme for a legal entity identifier led by the Financial Stability Board (FSB) is launched, expected by March 2013. DTCC and SWIFT have already assigned and validated information on more than 24,000 provisional CICIs for legal entities, many of which are involved in OTC derivatives trading, and made them available through the Global Financial Markets Association (GFMA) website.

CICI Utility will allow firms involved in the OTC credit and interest-rate derivatives markets to register for and be assigned an identifier prior to the effective data of the CFTC transaction reporting and recordkeeping rule, now set for mid-October.