In 2009 the G20 leaders agreed that all over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives contracts should be reported to trade repositories as part of their commitment to reform OTC derivatives markets in order to improve transparency, mitigate systemic risk and protect against market abuse. Aggregation of the data being reported across the trade repositories is necessary to help ensure that authorities can obtain a comprehensive view of the OTC derivatives market and activity.

In September 2014, the Financial Stability Board published a study of the feasibility of options for a mechanism to produce and share global aggregated data. One of the study’s conclusions was that “it was critical for any aggregation option that the work on standardisation and harmonisation of important data elements be completed, in particular through the global introduction of the Legal Entity Identifier and the creation of a unique transaction identifier (UTI) and unique product identifiers.

The Committee on Payments and Markets Infrastructures and the International Organization of Securities Commissions have published a consultative report, Harmonisation of the Unique Transaction Identifier.

The purpose of the consultative report is to help develop guidance for a uniform global UTI. The role of the UTI is to uniquely identify each OTC derivatives transaction required by authorities to be reported to trade repositories. The consultative report seeks comments from respondents to ensure that the UTI guidance meets the authorities’ characteristics for the UTI, thus enabling the consistent global aggregation of OTC derivatives transaction data. The general points that respondents are asked to respond to are:

  • which OTC derivatives transactions should be assigned a UTI?
  • which entities (or entities) should be responsible for generating UTIs in practice?
  • what should be the structure and format of a UTI?
  • what steps would help to ensure that UTIs generated under the new guidance are distinct (to the extent necessary to achieve aggregation) from those UTIs generated under existing regimes?

View Harmonisation of the Unique Transaction Identifier, consultative report issued by CPMI-IOSCO, 19 August 2015