European Single Access Point ESAP
Towards a more interconnected European capital market
The new Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council (EU) of 13 December 2023 establishing a European Single Access Point (ESAP) is effective from 9 January 2024. The new Regulation goes hand in hand with the EU’s drive for greater capital market interconnection, which is part of a long-term trend accelerated by the Capital Markets Union’s Action Plan 2020.
The aim of this Regulation is to create a single point of access to information on financial market operators and financial products across the European capital market. For example, it should be as easy for an investor in Denmark or Bulgaria to get information on a Czech fund or bond as it is for an investor in Prague or Brno. The ESAP should be a free, user-friendly, centralised and digital access point to financial information for investors across the European Union, with a particular focus on access to sustainability information.
To facilitate access (and overcome the European language barrier), the EU will provide at least basic machine translation of the information. At the same time, efforts to create a central location for all relevant information on financial companies and products are not new. In many respects, Europe is catching up with established practice abroad: a similar database has been in operation in the United States since 2001 (the EDGAR system).
The new Regulation is only a first step towards the establishment of ESAP. The EU expects to adopt further regulatory technical standards that will further clarify and specify the specific functioning of the various ESAP mechanisms, including the specific form of the machine-readable format of the information to be filed. The actual launch of the ESAP is planned for 10 July 2027, with the first information appearing in the ESAP on 10 January 2028. During the pilot publication, sustainability information under the SFDR and key information disclosures under the PRIIPs KID Regulation should be available. The collection of information will then be delegated to national supervisors.
