ESMA issues guidelines on non-significant benchmarks

On 20 December 2018, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published its final report on guidelines on non-significant benchmarks under the Benchmarks Regulation (BMR).

The final report proposes lighter requirements for non-significant benchmarks, their administrators and their supervised contributors in relation to four areas:

• procedures, characteristics and positioning of oversight function;
• appropriateness and verifiability of input data;
• transparency of methodology; and
• governance and control requirements for supervised contributors. 

The first three areas are applicable to administrators of non-significant benchmarks while the fourth one is directly applicable to supervised contributors to non-significant benchmarks.

Background

The BMR introduces a regime for benchmark administrators within the European Union that ensures the accuracy and integrity of benchmarks.