On December 4, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a press release announcing details of its ‘cutover plan’ for firms transferring to the FCA Financial Instruments Transparency System (FCA FITRS) and FCA Financial Instruments Reference Data System (FCA FIRDS) upon Brexit (the Press Release).

Following the end of the transition period at 23:00 (UK time) on December 31, the European Securities and Markets Authority will stop the FCA’s access to two key systems that are required to operate the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) regimes. In preparation for this, the FCA has created equivalent systems for UK MiFID reporting called FCA FIRDS and FCA FITRS.

Firms are currently able to use these systems for testing, however the FCA will make both systems unavailable from December 16 until January 2, 2021 to rebuild its data and launch with refreshed data.

The FCA has also published a webpage detailing a cutover system availability timeline and provides further information for firms to better understand each system.

The Press Release is available here.