AMF MiFIR transaction reporting in France

The French transaction-reporting obligation catches firms that are certain it does not apply to them. Article 26 of MiFIR — Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 — requires an investment firm executing transactions in financial instruments to report them to its competent authority as quickly as possible, and no later than the close of the following working day. In France the AMF fixes that as D+1 23:59:59, takes the reports through a platform called ICY, and asks every investment services provider to file a questionnaire — including the ones that do not report at all. The 2024 MiFIR review then moved two things most teams have not re-read: which authority a branch reports to, and which OTC derivatives are in scope.

1. The obligation, and what “executing” means

Article 26(1) puts the duty on investment firms which execute transactions. Article 26(2) sets the perimeter: instruments admitted to trading or traded on a trading venue, or for which admission has been requested, whether or not the transaction itself happens on the venue; instruments whose underlying is an instrument traded on a venue; instruments whose underlying is an index or a basket of such instruments; and — as amended — OTC derivatives within Article 8a(2), whether or not traded on a venue. OTC derivatives outside Article 8a(2) are in scope only when carried out on a trading venue.

The AMF is explicit that only providers which execute are caught — and equally explicit about the exception that catches everyone out. A firm acting in reception and transmission of orders becomes subject to the obligation whenever it does not pass certain information, the client’s identity being the AMF’s own example, to the firm it sends the order to. In that case the transmitting firm must report all the characteristics of the transaction itself. Article 26(4) is the underlying rule: transmit the full details with the order, or report the executed order as your own transaction.

So the question is not “do we execute?” It is “does everything the executing firm needs actually travel with our order?” An introducing model that withholds client identity for commercial or data-protection reasons has, without deciding to, put itself in scope.

2. Who reports to the AMF — and the branch rule that changed

Article 26(8) now reads differently from the version most procedures were written against. An investment firm reports transactions executed wholly or partly through its branch to the competent authority of its own home Member State. A third-country firm’s branch reports to the authority that authorised that branch; where a third-country firm has branches in several Member States, those branches determine between them the single competent authority that receives all the reports.

Read plainly: an EU investment firm passporting a branch into France does not, on that basis, report to the AMF. Its home authority does. The AMF receives reports from French-authorised providers — investment firms and credit institutions providing investment services — and from third-country branches it has authorised. Article 26(1) then requires competent authorities to arrange onward flows so that the authority of the most relevant market for liquidity, the authorities supervising transmitting firms, the authorities supervising branches involved and the authority supervising the venues used all receive the information, with everything made available to ESMA without undue delay.

A second addition is easy to miss. Under Article 26(5), the operator of a trading venue reports transactions in instruments traded on its platform which are executed through its systems by any member, participant or user not subject to MiFIR. Venue operators inherit reporting for participants who have no obligation of their own.

3. ICY, the D+1 clock, and the questionnaire nobody expects

The AMF provides reporting entities with a platform called ICY and publishes a reporter’s guide covering how to use it and the points that drive report quality. The deadline is stated as the end of the following business day, D+1 23:59:59, D being the transaction date. Account creation, questions and incidents all route through the AMF’s transaction-reporting mailbox.

That questionnaire is the step firms discover late. It records general information about the institution and the reporting route it has chosen, and the AMF treats it as a standing declaration rather than a one-off form: it is to be returned systematically each time one of its fields changes. A firm that switches from direct submission to an ARM, changes the entity that transmits on its behalf, or concludes that it has moved out of scope has a filing to make either way. Being out of scope is itself something the AMF expects to be told.

4. Direct, venue or ARM — and where the liability sits

Article 26(7) allows three routes: the firm itself, an ARM acting on its behalf, or the trading venue through whose system the transaction was completed. The AMF lists the same three.

The liability allocation is the part worth putting in a contract review. The investment firm is responsible for completeness, accuracy and timely submission. By derogation, where it reports through an ARM or a venue, it is not responsible for failures attributable to that ARM or venue — which are then responsible themselves. But the firm “must nevertheless take reasonable steps to verify” completeness, accuracy and timeliness of what was submitted on its behalf. Outsourcing moves the failure, not the oversight: a firm with no independent reconciliation against its own blotter has not taken those reasonable steps, whatever its ARM contract says.

Where there are errors or omissions, the ARM, firm or venue that reported must correct the information and submit a corrected report. There is no version in which a rejected report is someone else’s problem to leave.

One structural point about the French market that the AMF’s own published list makes plain: of the ARMs connected to its reporting system, the authorisations were granted by the Dutch, Spanish, Polish and Irish authorities. None was granted by the AMF. Since the 2019 restructuring, data reporting services providers are authorised under MiFIR Title IVa — by ESMA as a rule, with national competent authorities retaining APAs and ARMs identified under the Article 2(3) delegated act. A French firm outsourcing its reporting is therefore contracting with a provider supervised elsewhere in the Union, and its own operational-resilience and outsourcing file should say so.

5. The fields, and where rejections concentrate

The field list and formats sit in RTS 22, Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/590, with 65 fields per report, and the AMF points reporting entities to the ESMA guidelines published on 2 October 2017 for the level-2 detail. Article 26(3) names the substance directly: instrument names and numbers, quantity, dates and times of execution, effective dates, prices, a designation identifying the parties on whose behalf the firm executed, designations identifying the persons and the computer algorithms responsible for the investment decision and for the execution, a designation identifying the entity subject to the obligation, and the means of identifying the firms concerned. On-venue transactions carry the venue-generated transaction identification code, disseminated to both buying and selling members. For commodity derivatives, the report must indicate whether the transaction reduces risk in an objectively measurable way.

Rejections cluster in three places, and each is a reference-data problem rather than a reporting one. Counterparty identification — Article 26(6) requires a legal entity identifier for every client that is a legal person, and a missing LEI is a rejected report, not a warning. Natural-person identifiers, where RTS 22 prescribes an identifier hierarchy by country of residence with constructed fallback codes; the look-up has to live in the reporting flow, not in a spreadsheet. And decision-maker and executor designation, which for algorithmic trading means the algorithm itself must be identifiable and stable across releases.

6. Two worked examples

An introducer that thought it was out of scope. A French provider receives client orders and transmits them to an executing broker, deliberately withholding client identity under its own data-minimisation policy. It files nothing. Rule: Article 26(4) requires the transmitting firm to include all the details specified in Article 26(1) and (3) with the order, or else to report the executed order as its own transaction; the AMF states that an RTO firm that does not pass information such as the client’s identity must report all the characteristics of the transaction. What the firm does: either amends the transmission agreement so the full detail travels with the order, or stands up its own reporting and returns the RDT questionnaire recording the change. Outcome: a scoping assumption that rested on the word “execute” is replaced by one that rests on what actually travels with the order.

An ARM outage on a reporting day. A firm reporting through an ARM finds that a day’s file was never delivered. Rule: Article 26(7) leaves the firm responsible for completeness, accuracy and timeliness, but removes responsibility for failures attributable to the ARM — provided the firm has taken reasonable steps to verify what was submitted on its behalf; whoever reported must correct and resubmit. What the team does: relies on a daily count-and-notional reconciliation between its own blotter and the ARM’s acknowledgements, which is what makes the gap visible on the day rather than at a supervisory review; documents the failure as attributable to the ARM; and drives the corrected submission. Outcome: the derogation is actually available, because the firm can show the verification step that conditions it. Without that reconciliation, the firm is back on the hook for its provider’s outage.

7. FAQ

8. What to do, today

Re-scope on what travels with the order rather than on the word “execute”, and check whether any introducing or RTO flow withholds client identity. Re-read Article 26(8) against your branch map: if you passport a branch into France, the reports go home, and a procedure that names the AMF is wrong. Return the RDT functional questionnaire, and add it to your change-control checklist so it is refiled when the reporting route changes — including if you conclude you are out of scope. If you report through an ARM, build the daily reconciliation against your own blotter that the Article 26(7) derogation quietly conditions, and record in your outsourcing file which authority actually supervises that provider. And put the Article 8a(2) perimeter in front of whoever owns your OTC derivative flows, because that boundary moved and the scoping memo probably predates it.

Related: how a MiFIR report is built · AMF MiFID II investment firm authorisation · the ESMA ‘report once’ reform