In the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) staff’s third letter of 2022, the Division of Data gave no-action relief for swap data reporting amendments adopted by the CFTC in November, 2020. Those amendments were accompanied by technical specifications from the CFTC, and the CFTC revised those technical specifications in September, 2021. Provisionally registered swap data repositories cited the CFTC’s September, 2021 technical revisions and asked for no-action relief until December 4, 2022 from most of the amended reporting, and until December 5, 2023 for block and cap trade reporting. In CFTC letter 22-3 issued on January 31, 2022, the Division of Data staff granted that no-action relief. This staff letter gives swap dealers and any other reporting entities roughly six more months to comply with the CFTC’s amendments to Parts 43, 45, 46, and 49 of its regulations.
In a concurring statement also released on January 31, 2022, Commissioner Dawn Stump supported the CFTC staff’s no-action relief. She also called for the CFTC to use the data when it is reported to potentially revise the 67% notional block size threshold. Beginning in 2010, the CFTC has considered conditions for excluding large notional amount swap transactions, commonly referred to as “block trades”, from real-time reporting requirements. Commissioner Stump emphasized the need for swap data repositories to provide more helpful data for the CFTC by complying with the amended regulations and the need for the CFTC to consider that data and potentially revise its definition of a block trade.
Operations teams systems testing to meet the December 2022 and December 2023 compliance dates may save themselves future work by watching the ISO 20022 and UPI data standards: the CFTC staff “expects the use of those standards to be required by the Commission in Q4 2023.”
For more information, please see https://www.cftc.gov/LawRegulation/CFTCStaffLetters/letters.htm