Telekurs Financial is reporting good take-up of its MiFID-specific reference data. The vendor declines to be specific on client numbers, but says it is “more than happy” with sign-up rates, and says the MiFID reference data has “attracted a steady number of new clients” across Europe and the rest of the world.
The data vendor first announced its line-up of reference data for MiFID a little over a year ago, when it said it would provide a range of data types including: shares admitted to trading on Regulated Markets; MiFID liquid shares; classification of trading venues; best trading venues; product groups and trading times; MiFID complex instruments/non-complex instruments; MiFID reportable instruments; MiFID transaction data; and industry standard codes for identifying financial instruments, markets and companies, including CFIs, MICs and IBEIs.
Richard Newbury, head of product management at Telekurs UK, says the MiFID project at Telekurs Financial is still ongoing, because the industry’s implementation of the directive is not yet complete, and rules from all regulators are not yet necessarily clear. “Our strategy was always to use the strength of our local staff in Europe’s financial centres to bring back all of the local market requirements to a centralised implementation project so that we could satisfy the needs of all our clients no matter where they were,” he says. “Because regulators were not ready in each country, we expect new requirements to come to light over the next couple of years and we will integrate them as and when necessary.” Consequently, the Telekurs Financial MiFID project team is still in place, and its experts around Europe will continue to meet with local regulators and clients to ensure new requirements can be taken into consideration and implemented in future releases.
One example of where Telekurs has already made a change is for Danish MBS instruments, Newbury adds. “Adhering to the strict interpretation of MiFID rules, these instruments were classified as ‘complex instruments’ in our database. Following local market feedback, we learned that the Danish regulator, Finanstilsynet, considers these instruments as ‘non-complex’. Because of our robust data model, we were able to reclassify all of the instruments in one simple sweep of our database,” he says.
Telekurs iD and VDB clients have online access to MiFID related data automatically as part of their existing licence agreements. Existing feed clients have agreed to have MiFID data added to their licence agreements, and a number of new clients have taken only the relevant parts of Telekurs Financial’s feeds, Newbury reports.
There has been some controversy at an industry level about the fact that Telekurs, in its capacity as National Numbering Agency (NNA) – along with other NNAs – has been issuing its own IBEIs for entity identification, despite the fact that the official ISO IBEI has not received approval (and indeed is back on the drawing board after rejection by the national markets). Newbury insists Telekurs Financial’s plan has always been only to allocate IBEI type numbers as an NNA for Switzerland (and a Substitute (SNA) in countries such as Luxembourg and the Netherlands) until ISO ratified its IBEI standard – at which point it will cede control of this item to whichever registration authority is appointed to issue IBEIs. Telekurs only issues IBEIs for companies domiciled in countries where it is an NNA or SNA, and if a company feels it has been incorrectly allocated an IBEI Telekurs will remove it or update company structure data.
“ISO has asked for Working Group 8 to be reconstituted, and that it should resubmit the proposal made for the introduction of IBEI. Sub-committee 4 has agreed that the NNAs should continue to issue IBEIs which may be transferred to a new issuing authority once the standard is agreed and released by ISO,” Newbury says. He adds that “the NNAs are working closely with Swift” to ensure there is some conformity with BICs issued to corporate bodies and CIVICs issued to funds.
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