Recital 4

(4)To date, however, no supervised entity has applied for authorisation to act as a CTP. In its report of 5 December 2019 on the development in prices for pre- and post-trade data and on the consolidated tape for equity instruments, the European Supervisory Authority (European Securities and Markets Authority) (ESMA) established by Regulation (EU) No 1095/2010 of the European Parliament and of the Council ⁶ identified three main obstacles that have prevented supervised entities from applying for authorisation as a CTP: first, a lack of clarity as to how a CTP is to obtain data from the various execution venues or from the data reporting service providers concerned; second, insufficient quality in terms of harmonisation of the data reported by those execution venues to allow for a cost-efficient consolidation; and third, a lack of commercial incentives to apply for authorisation as a CTP. It is therefore necessary to remove those obstacles. Such removal requires, first, that all trading venues and APAs (‘data contributors’) transmit data to CTPs, and, second, an improvement of the data quality by harmonising the data reports that data contributors are to submit to the data centres of CTPs.