EquiLend Insight
EquiLend SFTR: The System Behind the Solution
CJ Emson
Aug 2025
Now approaching its fifth year of operation, SFTR has moved well beyond its initial implementation challenges, with the focus increasingly turning toward data quality, reconciliation and supervisory scrutiny.
SFTR applies to securities financing transactions (SFTs) made with European entities. As a measure to increase transparency in SFTs, the regulation requires all firms subject to SFTR to report a range of matched, verified fields to a trade repository from which the regulator can access and analyze this data.
The SFTR reporting requirement began on July 13, 2020 for banks, broker-dealers, exchanges and CCPs, with buy-side firms required to begin reporting in October 2020.
While its origins are in European legislation, those trading outside of the EU in bonds, equities and other securities are additionally impacted, where the SFT is concluded through an EU or UK branch.
For many firms and third-party SaaS providers, maintaining alignment with evolving SFTR standards now requires continued investment in data governance, operational controls and reconciliation frameworks, particularly as expectations increase under the latest ICMA guidance and as regulators take a more proactive stance. Our own systems have continued to evolve, with further enhancements to our already wide-ranging suite of trade lifecycle products, including Unified Comparison.
Unified Comparison, the nucleus of our Post-Trade Suite, underpins our SFTR solution, and operates seamlessly with NGT, our market leading trading solution. Enabling clients to interact with their post-trade systems in completely new ways, the data quality from Unified Comparison is made possible by its interoperability across the broader EquiLend ecosystem and the powerful processing which is embedded within the system.
Since its launch, Unified Comparison has been at the forefront of post-trade services. Our award-winning software is feature and functionality rich and, for SFTR specifically, Unified Comparison acts as a building block to enable clients the flexibility to report all required fields accurately.
Unified Comparison supports SFTR in the following ways:
- Seamlessly supports linking allocations to omnibus trades and enables efficient matching criteria
- Delivers full reconciliation of books and records
- Future-proof solution for SFTR regulatory reporting requirements with minimal additional lift for Operations teams
Unified Comparison supports all equity and fixed income products, reconciling global pending trades to recognized industry standards. With data aggregation of pre-matched and confirmed trades, downstream lifecycle noise is significantly reduced. For SFTR reporting, this filtration ensures that only pre-matched data is shared with our SFTR partners, MarketAxess, for further data enrichment ahead of reporting to a client’s Trade Repository (TR) of choice. This segregation enables clients to resolve issues with problematic trades ahead of reporting submission, significantly reducing breaks and ensuring premium data quality downstream for both parties.
In 2025, the regulatory agenda continues to evolve, with ICMA’s latest Recommendations for Reporting under SFTR (March 2025) providing further clarity on key reporting areas, including sponsored and indemnified repo, pools of collateral, foreign branch obligations and variable-rate trades. In parallel, increased supervisory focus — as evidenced through FCA Market Watch 81 and ESMA’s Call for Evidence on streamlining reporting — underscores the importance of robust, accurate and efficient SFTR reporting.
At the heart of our SFTR solution, Unified Comparison creates systemic efficiency and further opportunity for modernization across all areas of trading and regulation, providing clients with a resilient, future-proof foundation for SFTR, now and in the future.
SFTR
EquiLend offers a scalable, cost-effective, light-touch solution—the simplest solution in the market to meet the demands of SFTR
Who We Are
EquiLend is a global financial technology firm offering trading, post-trade, market data, regulatory and clearing services for the securities finance, collateral and swaps industries. EquiLend has offices in New York, Toronto, London, Dublin, Hong Kong and Tokyo.
