Daylight Saving Time will end Sunday (27 October 2024) for the UK and most European countries. While you turn your clocks and watches back by 1 hour at home, you will also need to ensure the time settings in your trade/transaction reporting are correct.
Here are 2 tips to help you ensure your trades/transactions are reported at the correct time:
1. Check the Time fields in your handback files today
29 October 2024 will be the first day that you receive handback files for trades/transactions carried out after the end of daylight saving.
The UK’s FCA has previously raised concerns with inaccurate trading date time submissions (in Market Watch 59) during daylight saving changes. They have advised firm to have arrangements in place to ensure consistent and accurate reporting of trading date time. In addition, CSSF of Luxembourg performed data quality tests on transaction reports and identified that in several transaction reports, the time indicated in trading date time was the local time instead of UTC.
Firms should synchronise their business clocks to record date and time in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as stipulated in both the ESMA and FCA regulations. It is important to do the following checks and act promptly if there is any problem.
You will need to cross check the time of your trades/transactions against the UTC time recorded under the following LSEG Post Trade (formerly UnaVista) fields:
- MiFIR – Trading Date Time field
- EMIR – Execution Timestamp field
- SFTR – Execution Timestamp field
How to check?
- Pick a few trades from your raw data and convert the time to UTC time; and
- Compare those against the UTC populated under the fields as described above in your handback files.
If the time does not match, please contact us.
2. Check time recorded for daily snapshot (if applicable)
For firms who do a daily snapshot for trade/transaction reporting, double check if it is taking place at the intended end-of-day time.
With these simple checks above, you will save the time and effort from submitting corrections for your trades. This will also minimise breaches in the future.
If you have any concerns or are not sure how to do this check, please contact us.
