How the UK’s new ‘harmonisation’ task force will work

The transaction reporting task force set up by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England is intended to resolve a longstanding regulatory problem: how to reduce duplicate and low-value submissions without compromising regulators’ ability to detect misconduct.

Over the next 18 months, 50 industry representatives will examine how reporting requirements can be aligned across the UK Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation, the UK European Market Infrastructure Regulation and the UK Securities Financing Transactions Regulation.

The task force, announced on 27 July, will advise the FCA and the Bank of England on standardising reporting fields, eliminating unnecessary duplication and improving data quality. 

Its work will be divided among policy, strategy and architecture groups chaired by officials from the two regulators. Although it has no rulemaking powers, the taskforce’s recommendations are expected to inform reforms to a system that costs financial firms hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

The UK review is running in parallel with work by the European Securities and Markets Authority on the EU’s transaction reporting framework. The Banker understands that the FCA and Esma are in contact over their respective reviews.

How the task force will operate

The task force’s 50 members are drawn from banks, investment firms, trading platforms, technology companies and industry associations.

They include representatives from JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, UBS and BlackRock. Members will serve without pay for an initial 18-month term, after which their appointments will be reviewed.

Each group will be chaired jointly by officials from the FCA and the BoE and will examine a different part of the reporting framework, from the design of the rules to the systems used to submit and process data. Rule changes will remain the responsibility of the FCA and the BoE.

Even within those limits, the group “represents an exceptional opportunity to enhance efficiency and reduce complexity for market participants”, said Giulia Pecce, head of secondary markets and wholesale investor protection at the Association for Financial Markets in Europe and a member of the task force.

Why reform is needed

The task force forms part of a wider effort by UK regulators to reduce the cost and complexity of transaction reporting.

The financial industry has pressed for such a review for several years. In February 2025, UK Finance responded to an FCA discussion paper on the topic by urging regulators to simplify the framework. The trade association argued that overlapping obligations raised compliance costs, weakened the UK’s international competitiveness and held back economic growth.

The FCA acknowledged the problem in a consultation paper published in November. It said separate reporting regimes had created overlapping requirements, while similar data fields and guidance were often defined or applied inconsistently.

Standardising those requirements could reduce firms’ operational burden and improve the quality of the information received by regulators. The FCA estimates that financial firms spend £493mn a year complying with the UK MiFIR reporting regime, one of the three frameworks under review.

Those obligations generate more than 7bn transaction reports for the FCA each year, although the regulator has acknowledged that not all the data it receives is useful.

Some reforms are already under way. In August, the FCA announced changes to the UK MiFIR reporting regime that it said would cut annual compliance costs by £100mn, reduce erroneous submissions and improve data quality. The measures will also reduce the number of reporting fields from 65 to 52.

Three regimes under review

The three regimes originated in EU law and were incorporated into UK law after Brexit.

UK MiFIR governs securities and financial markets; UK Emir covers derivatives, central counterparties and trade repositories; and UK SFTR applies to securities financing transactions.

Although they were designed to cover different markets and activities, the FCA has found that the regimes frequently require firms to submit similar information in different formats and to different recipients.

Some transactions must therefore be reported more than once. UK MiFIR reports can be submitted directly to the FCA or through an approved reporting mechanism, while reports under UK Emir and UK SFTR are submitted to trade repositories.

The duplication has increased firms’ compliance burden without necessarily producing data of equivalent regulatory value.

“The cost and burden of reporting under the current rules is simply not justified given the questionable value of the data the FCA receives,” said Adam Jacobs-Dean, global head of markets, governance and innovation at the Alternative Investment Management Association and a member of the task force.