The Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) is the EU and UK reporting regime that provides weekly aggregated data on repo and other securities financing markets, offering transparency but with important gaps such as currency, maturity, and potential double-counting.

SFTR is the core source of transparency data for repo markets in Europe and the UK. It has been in force since January 2021 and provides weekly aggregated statistics on repo, securities lending, margin lending, and buy/sell-backs. The dataset includes notional traded, notional outstanding, and number of transactions, broken down by venue, cleared status, and counterparty location.

SFTR does not include currency, maturity, price, or CCP identifiers, and cleared trades are reported post-novation, which leads to double-counting. These gaps mean that while SFTR is the most comprehensive public dataset on repo activity, it must be carefully adjusted and interpreted to provide an accurate view of the market.

What follows is a practical guide to what the SFTR data tells us about repo markets today.

What does the SFTR data include?

• SFTR data mainly consists of Repo trading, but also covers securities lending, margin lending and buy/sell-backs.
• It is published weekly, for free.
• It is published in both the UK and the EU as of January 2021, providing a decent amount of history.
• The data is updated weekly.
• It is not “trade level”, but rather aggregated at a transaction type level.
• The data covers notional amounts traded (“volume”), notional outstanding, and number of transactions.
• Details per transaction type include:
  • Venue – whether it was executed on a domestic (UK or EU depending on regime), an offshore venue or completely off venue.
  • Cleared status – cleared or uncleared.
  • Counterparty locations – where both counterparties are based (domestic or offshore).

What is missing?

• Currency.
• CCP identifiers.
• MIC codes (for the venues).
• Maturity.
• Price data. This is volume data only (similar to how I used to look at swaps data cross SDRs, CCPs, SEFs).

What do you need to understand?

There are two big considerations when looking at SFTR data:

• Cleared trades are reported “post novation”. This means that the CCP breaks the trade into two “legs”, and each leg (CCP vs Counterparty) is reported. I therefore choose to divide all cleared volumes in the data by two.
• A trade may be reported under both regimes (UK and EU). If a French bank trades with an American bank and they clear the trade at LCH RepoClear:
  • LCH will report two legs, both of which are UK vs nonUK cleared repos to a UK Trade Repository.
  • The French bank will report a single trade under EU SFTR. This will appear as an EEA vs nonEEA cleared repo.
• We know that UK vs UK and EEA vs EEA trades are reported under a single regime. The tricky part is working out what to do with cross border business.

ICMA have done a great job in providing access to the free data here, and publish authoritative annual surveys of European repo markets here. They provide valuable context to the data.

The Data

That’s a lot to take in! Rather than drone on about the data, let’s look at what it shows. I have built a comprehensive ActrixFT app that pulls in the data context above, pre-aggregates the data and generates LLM-summaries. Anyone interested in repos will enjoy reading the market summaries:

Below, I pull out what the data shows over the past three years:

Types of SFT

It is all about the repo market! Repos account for 93% of total SFTR volume:

Volumes by Venue

Off-venue trading dominates. 60% of volumes, driven by repo, are executed off-venue:

Volumes are really growing

Average Daily Volumes have basically doubled in the past three years:

Clearing

The uptake of clearing has actually decreased over the past three years – a big surprise to me:

UK Market Growing More than the EU

Hold on for the cross-border chart before dismissing this one! When looking at a simple metric – overall volumes reported – the UK has seen significantly higher growth in the past 3 years. Maybe it is just seeing more cross-border business?

Cross Border Flows Dominate Financing

How much double-counting might there be in the data? The amount of “pure” UK or EU data is really quite small:

It is the large amount of cross border flow that makes the data hard to work with. We don’t know whether:

• A cross-border trade is UK to EU, US or Asia.
• Or is from EU to UK, US or Asia.
• We therefore cannot triangulate across the two data-series.
• Transparency would be hugely improved if the regions of counterparties were better delineated.

However, mapping the data out like this allows us to monitor whether “double counting” is increasing over time or not:

• Three years ago, 88% of flows were cross-border.
• This has stayed pretty consistent, sitting at 90% now.
• Despite the huge growth in overall volumes, there hasn’t been a structural shift in financing flows.

LCH RepoClear Data

We can incorporate LCH cleared data in two ways from the SFTR data:

• Cleared transactions reported UK to UK are gilts cleared at LCH Ltd.
• Cleared transactions reported EU to EU are EU Government Bonds cleared at LCH SA (with some also being BTPs cleared at CC&G/Euronext).
• These reported volumes should by divided by two because the CCP reports them as two legs.

Of the cross-border cleared transactions, there are several possibilities:

• US Treasuries cleared at DTCC. My feeling is that these are the majority of the volumes. Leave it with me to estimate how much!
• Gilts cleared by non-UK counterparties.
• Italian BTPs cleared by non-EU counterparties.
• Even JGB repos cleared at JSCC!

You can see from the data that adding in CCP reported volumes for repo is helpful in mapping out the overall repo market landscape:

Clearing Adoption

Adjusting for double-counting, our Repo Market Clearing Adoption metric under UK SFTR sits at 28%. This is similar to the BoE’s 23% for the Gilt market, but our SFTR data also covers EUR, USD, JPY etc denominated bonds.

What really jumps out from the data is how Clearing Adoption varies dramatically depending on how the trade was executed. Clearing is essentially zero for off venue trades:

In Summary

• SFTR offers transparency into repo markets, covering volumes, outstanding notional, and transactions across both UK and EU regimes since 2021.
• Cross-border trades dominate activity, accounting for ~90% of flows, though double-counting and lack of currency data limit clarity.
• Off-venue repo is king, representing 60% of reported volumes, while clearing adoption has fallen over the past three years.
• UK repo volumes have grown faster than the EU, with LCH and other CCP data providing further context for market structure.