On 9 August 2024, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published Consultation Paper 24/17: Enhancing the National Storage Mechanism (CP24/17).

Background

The National Storage Mechanism (NSM) is the FCA’s online free-to-use archive of company information, which includes regulated information disclosed by or in relation to regulated market issuers in accordance with the Disclosure Guidance and Transparency Rules (DTRs), Listing Rules, and Articles 17 to 19 of the UK Market Abuse Regulation. The NSM is used by investors, analysts, and other market participants. It currently receives approximately 11,000 visits per month.

The FCA’s proposals in CP24/17 are part of a broader initiative to improve the NSM’s functionality, which will augment other primary market changes, including the recent overhaul of the Listing Rules and the introduction of the Public Offers and Admissions to Trading Regulations regime, on which the FCA is currently consulting.

Proposals

In CP24/17 the FCA is proposing more comprehensive metadata requirements for regulated information. It also proposes that all Primary Information Providers (PIPs) use the same standard schema and Application Programming Interface for submitting information to the NSM, which will enable the regulator to implement improved data quality controls.

The FCA’s proposed metadata requirements will require the issuers and persons who are subject to DTR 6.2 and 6.3 to provide a more complete account of the names and legal entity identifiers that are relevant to the regulated information they file with it. The FCA also proposes amendments to the headline codes and categories in Annex 2 of DTR 8 to provide more tailored options for categorising regulated information and to reduce ambiguity. Finally, given that the classifications in Annex 1 of DTR 6 are not generally used by those filing regulated information, or by NSM users, the FCA proposes eliminating these classifications.

Next steps

The deadline for comments on CP24/17 is 27 September 2024.

The FCA plans to publish final rules by the end of this year.

It proposes that the data transmission requirements for PIPs and the metadata requirements for issuers come into force in the second half of 2025.