ESMA selects Etrading for EU OTC consolidated tape

ESMA announced it has awarded a contract to Etrading Software to develop an over-the-counter consolidated tape that will aggregate post-trade data for non-equity instruments across the European Union.

The contract requires Etrading Software to build a single data feed that combines reported transactions from Approved Publication Arrangements, trading venues and other reporting sources to provide unified price and volume information for bonds, derivatives and structured products.

Etrading will design, implement and operate the infrastructure to collect, normalise and disseminate OTC trade reports. The system must reconcile differing reporting formats and timestamps, ingest multiple instrument types and publish consolidated outputs in near real time. ESMA expects the feed to meet technical standards for data quality, timeliness and transparency.

ESMA framed the procurement as part of its mandate to improve post-trade transparency for non-equities. Bids were evaluated on technical capability, data processing architecture and operational resilience. The contract sets development milestones, interoperability testing with existing publication arrangements and provisions for ongoing maintenance and updates.

Access to the consolidated tape will be via subscription or redistribution agreements, subject to ESMA’s distribution and governance rules. The tape will produce standardised outputs intended for professional investors and regulators and will include processes for data governance, error handling and correction of late or amended reports.

Etrading is expected to work with national competent authorities, APAs and trading venues to integrate existing reporting streams. The vendor will coordinate with data users during the rollout, and ESMA has set testing phases to validate the accuracy and latency of consolidated outputs before full production release.

A consolidated tape provides a single, continuous record of executed trades and basic trade details such as price, volume, time and venue. Equities markets have had consolidated tapes in several jurisdictions; ESMA’s programme applies the model to over-the-counter instruments to centralise fragmented reporting and support supervision across EU member states.