It appears that swap market participants are beginning to use the service in increasing numbers as the Derivatives Service Bureau (DSB) reports a rise in registrations.
Since the Derivatives Service Bureau (“DSB”) entered production on 2 October, the DSB has witnessed a steady rise in registrations, with rising numbers of firms looking to be on-boarded in time for the start of MiFID II on 3 Jan 2018. Given the DSB’s status as a new OTC derivatives market infrastructure utility, the DSB is publishing this report to inform the industry of its progress and performance and to inform market participants of timelines for guaranteed on-boarding before MiFID II go-live.
As the industry’s first fully automated OTC derivatives reference data utility, there has been strong and rising interest for programmatic connectivity from swap market participants. Activity amongst technology vendors has also been strong, with many referring their own end-users to the DSB to discuss the best user model for each, including the use of the DSB’s free open-data.
In the first month of operations, the DSB has received executed contracts from 29 firms for programmatic connectivity, representing the majority of top-tier US and European swap dealers as well as some buy-side and trading venues. This pace of on-boarding is ahead of original expectations and with two months remaining to the end of the year, the DSB expects total numbers opting for programmatic connectivity to be at least the original projection of 100 contracts.
Registration for web search and file download have also been rising, with many users seeking information on the free to use end-of-day file download. Currently 90 market participants are using the DSB’s web GUI for ISIN creation and search, with another 700 in the DSB testing environment.
Interactions with users have also been steadily growing. Non-technical interactions through the DSB Secretariat have almost tripled from 30 queries a day in July, to 80 a day in October, with no sign of slowing. Technical support, which assists with connectivity and onboarding processes, has also experienced a similar growth in interactions.
In the first month of operation, the DSB has met all its performance and resiliency targets, including surpassing the 99.9% availability rate of the Service Level Agreement (SLA), with zero outages in production. Similarly, the performance of the system has surpassed the 1000ms requirement of the Latency SLA, with the DSB processing 99% of all requests within 230ms.
Additional product templates and updates for more complex OTC derivatives are being released on a near-weekly basis, with the current 49 products in production expected to be supplemented by an additional 34 products across all asset classes, including many exotic, non-standard products.
The DSB is also providing integration with European Securities and Markets Authority’s own instrument reference database, in order to provide market participants with the unified view of market and regulator instrument data that is required for determination of ToTV (Traded on a Trading Venue). Revised specifications and samples have already been released to allow industry preparations. The DSB will be hosting a webinar on this topic on 17 November, with speakers from ESMA and the DSB providing the latest information.
All use of the Derivatives Service Bureau requires registration. To register, to obtain the user agreement and related documentation, and to obtain technical support, please email your request to technical.support@anna-dsb.com.
To obtain non-technical information on the DSB including information on product templates, or to register for the 17 November ToTV webinar, as well as to subscribe to the DSB updates by email, please send your request to secretariat@anna-dsb.com.