On 10 October 2019, the FCA published instructions for its Financial Instruments Transparency System (FITRS). The instructions provide details on the files containing UK only transparency calculation results that the FCA will publish and instructions on how to use these files.

The FCA states that that the intended audience for these instructions are market participants that need to make use of the UK transparency calculation results in compliance with the Markets in Financial Instruments (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018 and the associated binding technical standards.

The FCA FITRS transparency files are calculated from transparency data collected from:

  • UK trading venues; and
  • UK approved publication arrangements.

The results files also include pre-Brexit results sourced from ESMA FITRAS, to the extent these results have not been superseded within FCA FITRS.

Earlier this week, ESMA published a public statement concerning the use of UK data in its databases and the performance of MiFID II calculations (our blog is here). This updated the ESMA statement issued on 5 February 2019 and informed stakeholders of ESMA’s approach to its IT applications and databases in the event of a no deal Brexit on 31 October 2019 and in particular focused on the MiFID II / MiFIR publications performed by the various ESMA databases (Financial Instruments Reference Database, EMSA FITRS, double volume cap mechanism data as well as the annual ancillary activity calculations).