(10)In order to comply with the legal obligation of best execution, investment firms, when applying the criteria for best execution for professional clients, will typically not use the same execution venues for securities financing transactions (SFTs) and other transactions. This is because the SFTs are used as a source of funding subject to a commitment that the borrower will return equivalent securities on a future date and the terms of SFTs are typically defined bilaterally between the counterparties ahead of the execution. Therefore, the choice of execution venues for SFTs is more limited than in the case of other transactions, given that it depends on the particular terms defined in advance between the counterparties and on whether there is a specific demand on those execution venues for the financial instruments involved. It is therefore appropriate that investment firms summarise and make public the top five execution venues in terms of trading volumes where they executed SFTs in a separate report so that that a qualitative assessment can be made of the order flow to such venues. Due to the specific nature of SFTs, and given that their large size would likely distort the more representative set of client transactions (namely, those not involving SFTs), it is also necessary to exclude them from the tables concerning the top five execution venues on which investment firms execute other client orders