TISA Assesses Vendors for Mifid II Reporting Solution

A not-for-profit industry body tasked with easing regulatory reporting requirements is currently selecting a vendor to build a centralized reporting platform.

The Investing and Savings Alliance (TISA) will announce by November 7 the vendor contracted to develop its industry-sponsored technical solution for reporting in the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid II).

The 200-member organization has a group within it focused on the Mifid II project; participating members include BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, and Morningstar. Members are in the process of selecting a provider from six responses to a request-for-proposal (RFP) that were submitted by the deadline on October 11.

TISA could not provide the names of the vendors involved in the RFP process for confidentiality reasons. 

As an initial step, the technical solution aims to provide a standardized reporting platform for efficiently delivering and sharing European Mifid Templates (EMTs) between asset managers and distributors.

In later iterations, the solution will also look to support other reporting standards, including a European PRIIPs Template, a European Mifid feedback template (EFT), UCITS Key Investor Information Documents (KIIDs), and environment, social and governance (ESG) factors.

The underlying objective of the Mifid II project is to create a standardized approach to reporting to enable fund managers to better comply with their regulatory obligations, improve efficiency and reduce technical costs.

“Most people will have already have some kind of EMT solution, but we want one where there will be a common upgrade and firms don’t have to start from scratch every time they upgrade,” Jeffrey Mushens, head of technical policy at TISA, says.

Winding Process

In December 2018, TISA held a two-day hackathon, followed by a request-for-information phase from industry suppliers, both to evaluate the possibility and value of developing a common solution. 

During the hackathon, financial firms tested both traditional platforms and a distributed ledger technology (DLT) solution to support EMT data and workflows.

Mushens says both types of technologies achieved the intended goals of publishing once and enabling everyone on the platform to view and interact with the data in real-time.

“The goal that we set them was to publish once, to have a golden source—one source of truth. And it should also be technology [agnostic], whereby it didn’t matter which kind of blockchain [or technology] it used. It had to be interoperable so that everyone could use it,” Mushens adds.

The technical solution is part of TISA’s wider Mifid II Costs, Charges, and Target Market project to develop common standards and a governance framework for Mifid II reporting.

The industry body has developed open standards for both downstream and upstream reporting, created the industry EFT and has developed its EMT to support Swift’s ISO20022 messaging standard.

TISA has been working with the industry on developing the technical solution since the beginning of 2018 and aims to have a real-life platform by mid-2020.