Regulatory Watch: DFA & EMIR, Differences and Deadlines

April 01, 2014

A quick look at the differences between the two regs; and a few deadlines too.

Fri Reg and Accting - Law BooksOver the next several months treasury practitioners will have to make changes to their reporting habits. At recent meetings of The NeuGroup’s FX Managers’ Peer Groups (both Group and Group 2), members discussed their readiness for coming Dodd-Frank and European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) rules deadlines, along with questions each had. With regards to readiness vis-à-vis, the majority of members reported in the pre-meeting survey that they are ready to comply with timely confirmation, portfolio reconciliation and dispute resolution, while somewhat fewer reported being ready to comply with daily reporting requirements or have their trades back-loaded.

There are several differences in requirements for trade reporting under Dodd-Frank and EMIR, such as who reports and what is reported. Some of those differences in reporting and other key requirements can be seen in the chart below:

Source: Standard Chartered

A few other items of note:

FX forwards and jurisdictional inconsistency: The UK and EU differ on the treatment of forwards. In the UK, forwards which settle in less than seven days or executed for commercial purposes are excluded from EMIR’s scope. However, because this debate is not settled and the EU is taking a more stringent approach on this so far, consider over-reporting rather than under-reporting to comply with EMIR.

In terms of deadlines, reporting to trade repository (TR) should have already begun – for entities in EMIR’s scope, TR reporting began February 12, 2014, with spotty success, according to news media. Both parties to a trade must report but a third party can be contracted to do it for you, including your banks, trading venues like FXall, vendors like SunGard, and trade repositories. Back-loading of trades is expected to be done in mid-May and enforcement of collateralization and valuation will begin in August, 2014 (as will Timely confirmation: enforcement August 2014).

And in April, there will be a few more deadlines, including:

  • Portfolio reconciliation: policy enforcement (need to be able to prove you have a policy in place for this) April 2014; quarterly reconciliation if > 100 contracts outstanding; annual reconciliation if < 100 contracts outstanding.
  • Portfolio compression: policy enforcement April 2014; semi-annual compression if > 500 contracts outstanding.
  • Dispute resolution: policy enforcement April 2014

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