TRS was designed and developed by LogicaCMG for the FSA and has been operational since November 2005. The system allows firms executing FSA reportable transactions to send their transaction reports electronically to the FSA and has been designed for compliance with the European Union's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID).

Under Article 25 of MiFID, investment firms which execute transactions in any financial instruments admitted to trading on a regulated market are required to report the details of these transactions to their regulator as quickly as possible, and no later than the close of the following working day. The regulators are required to establish the necessary arrangements so that the regulators of the most relevant markets in terms of liquidity for those financial instruments also receive this information.

John Evans, director of risk and compliance products at LogicaCMG, said: "We intend to provide a fully managed service allowing regulators to receive a single, over-night aggregated data feed for their monitoring systems. Collection of transaction reports from the investment firms will be provided by LogicaCMG along with registration, certification and help desk services."

Dilwyn Griffiths, Head of Market Monitoring at the FSA said: "TRS has helped investment firms in the UK by offering flexibility in the way they report electronically. Our agreement with LogicaCMG will benefit other regulators and could help them to comply with MIFID reporting requirements."

TRS recognises that investment firms may wish to send reports in a variety of ways depending on the number of reports they submit. Three mechanisms for report submission are provided: a web browser application to enable online entry of transaction reports, uploading XML files using a web browser application and direct machine to machine transfer of XML files. Investment firms may use one or more of these mechanisms depending on their requirements. They also have flexibility in how they batch-up their reports. For example, some organisations may simply create a single report, record all of its daily transactions and then submit this report at the end of the day. Other organisations may have a number of different reports and they may submit these throughout the day. TRS performs validation against the XML schema and the defined business rules to ensure high quality of submission data. The LogicaCMG service centre, provides help desk assistance to the investment firms including their registration to use TRS and certification that their systems and processes are functioning correctly against the trial system. Online help and computer based training are also supplied.

TRS is open standards based and uses a n-tier architecture for stability and security between the layers. The system is fully scalable and is currently deployed on hardware for 2000 users and 2.25 million transactions per day.