The Derivatives Service Bureau (DSB), the fully automated generator of International Securities Identification Numbers (ISINs) for the OTC derivatives market, today published their User fees for 2019. The DSB provides a trusted service which puts the user first, working on a cost recovery basis only. This coming year’s User fees reflect the increase in the number of DSB Users, as well as some User type adjustments following a year of operational activity which has enabled Users to have a better view of their connectivity requirements. 

The DSB is the first numbering agency designed to operate globally and provide near real-time allocation of ISINs. With an underlying technology platform that can handle multiple taxonomies of definitions and descriptive data, the DSB is a global utility enabling financial products to be recognised and traded between buyers and sellers around the world and subsequently efficiently processed, managed and administered by post-trade teams. Now used in 33 countries, the DSB was established by the Association of Numbering Agencies (ANNA) in 2017, and has just completed its first full year of providing the OTC derivative ISIN service.

Moving into its second year of operations, the 2019 fees reflect the normal and expected yearly adjustments, allowing for industry’s own recalibrations following this past year’s implementation requirements resulting from MiFID II, and additional functionality requested by industry during the annual consultation process.

Power Users, DSB Users who require programmatic connectivity to ISINs in real-time, have dropped slightly in number from 78 to 73, reflecting a shift by some Users to the Standard or Infrequent User type and to the consumption of the DSB’s free end of day data. This has meant that whilst overall costs have reduced slightly in 2019, there is a slight increase in the per user fees for Power and Standard User fees by 4.5% for next year. Infrequent Users (a category created to assist low volume and/or ad-hoc users) will see their fees unchanged in 2019. Additionally, there are now 12 Standard Users up from 10, and 29 Infrequent Users, up from 15 meaning the number of fee paying Users of the service has grown from 105 this year to 114 for the coming year.

With the overall User figures increasing, and the Infrequent Users having doubled, this reflects the increasingly diverse types of organisations using the service. Registered Users, who comprise the largest category of users making up two-thirds of the DSB’s user base, continue to access the full spectrum of OTC ISIN data free of cost. The banks continue to pay the larger percentage of the User fees, at 56%, with trading venues making up 31%, and other categories, such as the buy-side and data vendors, totalling 13%.

Emma Kalliomaki, Managing Director of ANNA and the DSB, said, “We are committed to the use of international standards to make the OTC derivatives market a more stable and efficient environment within which to trade. The DSB offers a cost-effective, reliable and robust automated service for providing ISINs, which are both agile and flexible to adapt to industry and regulatory requirements.”