The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) established joint data standards for data submitted to certain financial regulatory agencies.
The joint standards are designed to promote interoperability of financial regulatory data across the agencies. They seek to do this by establishing common identifiers for entities, geographic locations, dates, and certain products and currencies.
“The establishment of joint data standards across federal financial regulators will help ensure consistent data collection that will both ease burdens for financial institutions and make data more accessible to investors,” SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said.
Eight additional agencies have established or are expected to act on establishing the joint standards including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
“This action is a first step towards implementing the Financial Data Transparency Act across federal financial regulatory agencies,” SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda, said. “I am grateful to our colleagues across the federal government for their cooperation on this effort, which will be followed by separate rulemaking for agency-specific standards that will further improve the accessibility of financial data.”
The standards also include a principles-based joint standard with respect to data transmission and schema and taxonomy formats. These would allow financial institutions to submit high-quality, machine-readable data to the agencies.
“As market participants operate in an increasingly convergent financial ecosystem, they must navigate the regulatory requirements of multiple federal agencies that often require them to report similar or identical data using different data standards,” Michael Selig, chairman of the CFTC, said. “These inconsistencies increase costs on firms without a commensurate benefit to regulators’ use of the collected data. This final rule is an important step towards reducing these unnecessary burdens.”