On October 25, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Financial Transparency Act (FTA – H.R. 2989) by a vote of 400-19. Big thanks goes to the Data Coalition and many of our members who worked tirelessly to move this legislation forward. This is an important bill that has broad implications for expanding structured data into additional U.S. federal agencies, beyond the SEC, FDIC and FERC.
About the bill:
The FTA calls for eight financial regulatory agencies of the U.S. Financial Oversight Council (FSOC) to adopt and apply uniform data standards for information collected from regulated entities. These agencies include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In addition to these agencies, the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board (MSRB) would also be required to adopt data standards for information submitted to the MSRB’s Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) repository.
The language in the bill states that data standards shall:
“(A) render data fully searchable and machine-readable…
(B) enable high quality data through schemas, with accompanying metadata…documented in machine-readable taxonomy or ontology models, which clearly define the data’s semantic meaning as defined by the underlying regulatory information collection requirements;
(C ) assure that a data element or data asset that exists to satisfy an underlying regulatory information collection requirement be consistently identified as such in associated machine-readable metadata;
(D) be nonproprietary or made available under an open license;
(E ) incorporate standards developed and maintained by voluntary consensus standards bodies; and
(F) use, be consistent with, and implement applicable accounting and reporting principles.”
The FTA would also require regulators to adopt a common legal entity identifier.
Read the release.
Read the bill.
