The London Stock Exchange has agreed a £15 million cash deal to buy the Financial Services Authority's Transaction Reporting Service (TRS).
TRS is an approved reporting mechanism (ARM) developed by the FSA to provide firms with a method for meeting their MiFID reporting obligations.
It is used for the reporting of transactions in regulated instruments by firms to the FSA, which uses the information to detect and investigate suspected cases of market abuse, insider trading and manipulation.
However, with a competitive market now in place for the provision of transaction reporting services - in which the LSE operates its own service through the UnaVista platform - the FSA says it is "confident that the ARM market is now sufficiently developed" and it can sell off TRS to the LSE which was chosen "following a lengthy and competitive sale process".
TRS clients will be migrated on closing - which is subject to Office of Fair Trading clearance - to the UnaVista platform, which will accept brokers' TRS-formatted data submissions.
The exchange operator says TRS customers will benefit from "significant functionality enhancements" as well as the opportunity to use the same user interface to access other things on UnaVista, including reconciliations and the multi-asset class trade confirmation portal.
David Lester, director, information services, LSE, says: "Customers will benefit from a significantly improved product and access to a wide range of value added solutions. This underlines our commitment to our customers in assisting them with all their execution and trade processing needs."
Patrick Spens, head, market monitoring, FSA adds: "The FSA chose the London Stock Exchange because it is an organisation that has been handling transaction reporting for many years, and with its transaction reporting solution on UnaVista it was seen as an ideal choice for TRS clients."