Efama pushes for pre-trade data in European consolidated tape

The European fund industry has said it welcomed the proposal by European stock exchange operators to jointly develop a consolidated tape for equities in the EU but has warned that “the devil will be in the detail”.

Fourteen European exchange groups that operate in all EU member states — with the exception of Slovakia — have unveiled a joint initiative to participate in the future selection process for the provision of a consolidated tape for equities, a live database of securities trading across different European venues.

The collaboration comes in response to the European Commission’s proposal for an equities tape to contribute to the development of the bloc’s capital markets union.

The participating exchanges intend to establish a joint venture that will evaluate and prepare an application as a consolidated tape provider in a future selection process.

The 14 exchange operators have said the project will focus on providing “comprehensive, standardised and consistent source of market data, and will seek to collaborate with regulators to develop the optimal solution for investors”.

The European Fund and Asset Management Association, which represents more than 4,500 asset managers in the EU, said the collaboration “affirms the buyside’s longstanding view that a European consolidated tape is key to completing the objectives of the capital markets union and ensuring that European capital markets remain globally competitive”.

According to the fund industry body, it expects a consolidated tape for equities and exchange traded funds “to attract more capital flows into mid-cap and small-cap stocks, as well as smaller markets generally”.

While Efama welcomes the joint initiative by the 14 exchange operators, Tanguy van de Werve, Efama’s director-general, said “it is important that the resulting equities tape displays both pre and post-trade equities/ETF data in real time”.

In December last year, EU member states gave their backing to a close-to-real-time consolidated tape, following a dispute between asset managers and securities exchanges over trading data speed.

In May last year, several European financial markets and asset management trade bodies reached a “cross-industry consensus” on consolidated tape for EU equities.

Efama, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe, German fund management trade body the BVI and share trading venue Cboe Europe have published a joint position paper on an equities consolidated tape. In it they said a successful tape would “democratise” access to equities data, contributing to the creation of a truly pan-European market in line with the goals of the European Commission’s capital markets union project.

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