Establishment of a European Single Access Point (ESAP)

This amendment, referred to as ESAP II, follows on from the previous amendment (so-called ESAP I) and has a split effect on 10 July 2028 and 10 July 2030.

ESAP is planned as a single European portal that will enable public access to all published financial and non-financial information about companies and markets in the EU in one place. There should be no new obligations to publish something that is not already published today. The implementation of ESAP is divided into three phases:

In the first phase (10 July 2026, ESAP I), the collection of basic data will begin under the Transparency Directive (annual and semi-annual reports of listed issuers and holdings in listed issuers), the Prospectus Regulation (prospectuses) and the Short-Selling Regulation. This is information that is already collected today in the so-called OAM (officially appointed mechanism) available from the website of Czech National Bank (CNB). As a result, these national information repositories will be interconnected. On 10 July 2027, ESAP will be launched and made available to the public.

In the second phase (10 January 2028, the first part of ESAP II), the scope will be expanded to include rating agencies, EuVECA and EuSEF funds, the Market Abuse Regulation (insider information and managers’ transactions), key information documents (under the PRIIPs Regulation), the Benchmark Regulation, the PEPP Regulation, the SFDR, the UCITS Directive (so-called standard funds) and sustainability reports under the Accounting Act (Accounting Directive).

In the third phase (10 January 2030, second part of ESAP II), additional areas will be added such as the CRR Regulation, the Mandatory Audit Regulation, MiFIR, ELTIF funds, SFTR (repo transactions), money market funds, IFR (analogous to the CRR for investment firms), MiCA, EuGB (green bonds), the Conglomerates Directive, the Takeover Bids Directive, the Mandatory Audit Directive, the Shareholder Rights Directive (or vulgo “Shareholder Obligations Directive”), Solvency II, AIFMD, CRD, BRRD, MiFID, IDD, IORP, IFD (analogous to the CRD for investment firms) and the Covered Bonds Directive, thus launching the full operation of ESAP.

Obligated entities will have a new obligation to provide the published information, when sending it to the CNB, with metadata (identification of the entity, including LEI, type of information and whether it contains personal data, and, where relevant, other specific metadata such as the size of the issuer or the issuer’s industry). Among other things, there will be an obligation to obtain a LEI (legal entity identifier) if the obligated entity does not already have one. Also, in situations where the published information is not currently sent to the CNB, there will be an obligation to send it to the CNB. Sometimes the obligated entity is the CNB itself (for example, in the case of granted authorisations or imposed sanctions). The data must also be in a data extractable format, or in machine-readable format, if required.

From the perspective of users of the information ESAP will be beneficial as it will allow central access to all information, including easier searching and comparison. Theoretically, the data can also be used for data mining and machine learning, or the user can ask artificial intelligence to process it, for example summarize it or compare the relevant information. Data processing can also be carried out by specialized institutions, journalists, universities and scientists.