SFTR and EMIR: ESMA publishes technical advice on fees to trade repositories

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published a final report on technical advice to the EU Commission on fees for trade repositories (TRs) under the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR). The report responds to a formal request from the Commission on 15 January 2016 and focuses on the technical aspects of the regulation on fees.

Under SFTR, ESMA is granted direct registration and supervision powers over TRs and will charge fees to fully cover ESMA's necessary expenditure relating to the registration, recognition and supervision of TRs. In order to ensure a level playing field across both the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) and SFTR, ESMA also proposes certain changes to the way ESMA calculates fees for TRs under EMIR.

The technical advice sets out proposals for:

• an amendment to the general approach under EMIR relating to the treatment of surpluses and deficits in order to make it consistent with the new ESMA budgeting framework, and application of the same approach for the determination of fees under SFTR;
• simplification of the way the turnover of TRs is determined for the purposes of calculation of annual supervisory fees by including only revenues and excluding activity figures;
• lower fees in the case of extension of registration under SFTR, or in the case of concurrent application under both regimes;
• the calculation of fees for recognition of third country TRs and the reimbursement of the cost to national competent authorities (NCAs) in the case of delegation of tasks.

ESMA will submit the final report to the EU Commission.