ESMA’s ‘report once’: merging MiFIR, EMIR and SFTR transaction reporting

On 2 July 2026 ESMA set out its plan to collapse three separate transaction-reporting regimes — MiFIR, EMIR and SFTR — into a single “report once” template, with a target of the second half of 2031 and up to €1 billion a year in estimated savings. The final report is not law, but it is the clearest signal yet of where EU transaction reporting is heading: one modular data model, one submission, one supervisory source of truth. This piece explains what ESMA proposed, the near-term relief on the table, the realistic timeline, and what reporting firms should be doing now.

1. What ESMA published

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued, on 2 July 2026, its final report on the call for evidence for a comprehensive simplification of financial transaction reporting. It is a set of recommendations to the EU legislator — the European Commission, Parliament and Council — not binding rules. But it commits ESMA to a direction of travel: replacing the current sector-by-sector reporting frameworks with a single integrated system.

The three frameworks in scope are:

• MiFIR — Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 — transaction reporting on financial instruments
• EMIR — Regulation (EU) No 648/2012 — derivative-contract reporting to trade repositories
• SFTR — Regulation (EU) 2015/2365 — securities-financing-transaction reporting

2. The “report once” idea

ESMA chose the most ambitious of the options it consulted on: a move to “report once”. A single, modular data structure would carry a transaction’s details once, flexing to reflect the specifics of each instrument type, instead of the overlapping MiFIR, EMIR and SFTR submissions firms file today.