On December 17, 2015, the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures and the Board of IOSCO published proposed guidance on the Unique Product Identifier which will allow for the identification of OTC derivatives products that authorities require, or may require in the future, to be reported to trade repositories. The UPI is made up of an OTC derivatives products classification system and an associated code (i.e., how the UPI will be represented in trade reports). A separate consultation will be launched on the code at a later date. Currently, OTC derivative trades are reported to 20 trade repositories authorized for some asset classes. However, in order to properly mitigate systemic risk and protect against market abuse, it is necessary for data across trade repositories to be aggregated so that national regulators have a comprehensive view of the OTC derivatives markets and trading activity. The CPMI and IOSCO have been tasked by the Financial Stability Board with developing global guidance on the harmonization of data elements reported to trade repositories, including a Unique Transaction Identifier and a UPI. The CPMI and IOSCO are proposing principles and high-level business specifications for the UPI as well as two approaches for the granularity of the UPI classification system. In particular, feedback is sought on potential implementation challenges. The consultation closes on February 24, 2016.

The consultation paper is available at: http://www.bis.org/cpmi/publ/d141.pdf.

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