ESMA kicked off the derivatives tape selection on 5 Jan 2026. The EU bond (Jan 2025) and shares/ETFs (Jun 2025) selections were already underway last year.
On paper, this is “just” post-trade transparency infrastructure.
In reality, it is Europe attempting something it has been debating since MiFID II: a single, usable view of what actually traded, across venues and APAs, at scale. And yes, because we live in the best timeline, it is happening across the EU and the UK in parallel.
UK bonds tape: ETS Connect UK (Etrading Software) is working to a 22 June 2026 operational date and has published a delivery roadmap with concrete milestones (contracts, specs, APIs, UAT).
UK equities tape: FCA’s consultation targets operation in 2027.
UK derivatives tape: still a question mark. Even industry commentary notes the FCA has not stated its intention here yet.
If you are a desk, vendor, APA/ARM, TR, venue, or data consumer, this matters because it changes what “good” post-trade data looks like, who sets the standards, and how quickly you can turn transparency into actual execution analytics.
Quick take
EU is building three tapes; UK is building at least two.
Brexit makes “one Europe baseline” unlikely.
Tape value depends on data quality, correction logic, and licensing economics.
Expect adoption to start as analytics, not execution decisioning.
What a consolidated tape actually is (and what it is not)
A consolidated tape is meant to be a single, regulated feed of post-trade data, stitched together across venues and reporting mechanisms into something you can actually use for:
market-wide price discovery and valuation inputs
best execution evidence and benchmarking
surveillance and market integrity analysis
vendor and venue transparency (who printed what, when, and under what conditions)
The feed is live, but the content isn’t always immediate. MiFIR post-trade transparency is published “as close to real time as technically possible”, yet deferrals mean some trades legitimately appear later, especially in less liquid instruments and larger sizes.
What it is not:
a microsecond execution feed or a replacement for direct venue or dealer data
a magic liquidity fountain
a fix for fragmentation. It just makes fragmentation harder to hide
a cure for bad reporting discipline (it will centralise your bad data nicely, though)
In US equities, the analogue is the SIP model: consolidating quotes and trades into a single feed used to calculate things like NBBO.
In US credit, the obvious comparison is FINRA TRACE: mandatory OTC reporting and dissemination across ‘eligible’ fixed income.
In swaps, you see a similar outcome via SDR public reporting requirements (not a “tape” brand, but functionally a consolidated public transparency layer).
Europe wants a TRACE/SIP-style baseline, but across more jurisdictions, more reporting pathways, and more political scar tissue.
Think of it as post-trade truth plumbing. Unsexy until you try to do analytics without it.
Why has Europe taken so long?
Because emphasising “market integration” is easier than agreeing on who pays, who governs, and who loses margin.
MiFID II made the requirement possible, but not inevitable.
Europe has had post-trade transparency for years, but not a single “truth layer”. The obstacles were always structural:
Data quality and duplication is everyone’s problem, so it became nobody’s problem
A tape cannot be better than its inputs. Europe’s post-trade ecosystem includes multiple venues and multiple reporting channels, with plenty of edge cases, deferrals, flags, and duplicate publications.
Even in mature US regimes, one of the big practical challenges is eliminating duplicate “double prints” and making sure the public feed is informational, not noise. Europe has more sources and more noise.
Commercial incentives were (and are) misaligned
Market data is lucrative. A “single feed at reasonable cost” is not a sentence that makes data providers shareholders cheerful at Christmas.
“Europe” is not one market. It is a group project
Different market models, different venue mixes, and different national preferences about transparency. Standardisation takes longer when the room contains 27 countries and everyone brought their own definition of “reasonable”.
Brexit turned one tape problem into two tape problems
MiFID II split into EU MiFIR/MiFID and UK MiFIR/MiFID trajectories.
So now the question is not “will Europe have a tape?” but:
Will the EU and UK tapes converge operationally enough to be useful for cross-border desks?
Or will we end up with two “official” tapes that still require a third, commercial consolidation layer to make them comparable?
That second outcome is painfully plausible.
The EU plan: three tapes, one ESMA headache
ESMA’s model is now structurally clear. One CTP per asset class for bonds, equities (shares and ETFs), and OTC derivatives (or subclasses).
EU equities and ETFs tape
ESMA selected EuroCTP as the most suitable applicant in December 2025.
Industry reporting points to a July 2026 target for launch (subject to authorisation).EU bond tape
ESMA selected Ediphy (fairCT) as the first EU bond tape provider in July 2025.
But “go-live” is slipping: ESMA authorisation timelines suggest late 2026 or even 2027 is plausible.EU OTC derivatives tape
ESMA has opened the selection process; it intends to adopt a decision by early July 2026.
Procurement docs sit on the EU Funding & Tenders Portal (the practical reality behind the lofty strategy).
The UK plan: similar destination, different vehicle (and more court filings)
The UK is not “copying the EU”. It is building its own consolidated tape regime under FCA control, with its own selection mechanics, governance, and timing.
UK bond tape
The FCA is trying to get Etrading Software authorised ahead of a June 2026 launch target.
Earlier procurement documents referenced an expected commencement no later than 30 March 2026.UK equity tape
The FCA consultation on the framework for a UK equity tape opened 19 Nov 2025 and closes 30 Jan 2026.
Reuters reported the FCA expects it to be operational by 2027.UK derivatives tape
The FCA has not published a committed timetable for UK derivatives tape. However, what we do have is the FCA referring to “any future derivatives consolidated tape” in its policy materials, which signals intent but not a programme. Tradeweb commentary also notes the FCA has not stated its intention on a derivatives tape.
So, EU has a live derivatives tape procurement; UK has derivatives tape ambiguity.
Brexit made this harder than it needed to be
MiFID II split into EU MiFIR and UK MiFIR. And while the headlines still rhyme, the implementation details are free to diverge.
What that means in practice:
Two regulators (ESMA vs FCA), different governance, different supervision models.
Potentially two “tapes” for what is functionally the same European liquidity (especially for instruments traded cross-border).
Two onboarding programmes for venues, APAs, vendors and buy-side consumers.
Divergence risk in timestamps, field definitions, data quality rules, and redistribution rights.
If you run a pan-European stack, congratulations. You now have two versions of “the truth” to reconcile!
Standards and working groups
If you want one place where market plumbing people gather to argue about fields, flags, and how to stop everyone reinventing the same schema badly, it is FIX.
FIX Trading Community has explicit working groups for:
Consolidated Tape Working Group – Derivatives
European Consolidated Tape Working Group – Equities
European Consolidated Tape Working Group – Fixed Income
FIX has also been vocal on the practical reforms needed to make European tapes usable, including cutting non-informational noise and clarifying reporting obligations.
This matters because a tape is not “a dataset”. It is a standardisation project that needs to survive contact with production.
If a CTP wants adoption to happen quickly, it should provide:
versioned, machine-readable schemas (not just PDFs)
FIX-aligned message definitions where relevant
OpenAPI specs for APIs
test packs and sample datasets
certification harnesses (self-serve)
clear change management (diffs, deprecations, backward compatibility rules)
If the integration experience is “here’s 120 pages of PDF, good luck”, you haven’t built a tape. You’ve built a documentation-themed obstacle course.
Who funds the tape, and who pays to use it?
There are two funding problems:
1) Funding the operator (CTP economics)
In the UK, the FCA’s reverse auction approach became politically radioactive precisely because it looked like a race to the bottom.
Industry reporting, citing High Court filings, states the auction cleared at a weighted average price cap of 68p.
Ediphy’s challenge, suspension mechanics under procurement rules, and the wider debate about viability have been very public.
For balance: Etrading Software’s own messaging is that they made “early, concrete commitments” in funding, people, and technology, and “invested our own capital” to be able to move quickly. The UK bond tape contract notice shows £4.8m over multiple years.
In the EU, the debate is less about “68p theatre” and more about authorisation timing, governance, and getting contributors and consumers to actually implement. For the EU bond tape rollout, Ediphy/fairCT has reportedly been seeking ~£10m in funding.
2) Funding adoption (the part everyone forgets)
Even if the tape is cheap, integration isn’t.
Costs show up as:
vendor licence uplifts (market data entitlements are never “just a feed”)
implementation and onboarding (connectivity, security, certs, environments)
internal engineering (normalisation, mapping, storage, QA)
operational controls (reconciliation, monitoring, incident response)
downstream impacts (TCA platforms, surveillance stacks, vendor re-contracting)
A “low-cost tape” can still be a high-cost programme for consumers, especially if EU and UK implementations diverge.
What are the alternative sources for the same data today?
Today, firms stitch together “pseudo tapes” from combinations of:
venue feeds (RMs/MTFs/OTFs)
APA data (for OTC transparency publications)
commercial aggregators and data vendors
internal OMS/EMS execution logs and counterparty confirms
trade repositories for regulatory reporting context (useful, but not the same thing)
bespoke consolidated views inside platforms (good for workflow, rarely a market-wide truth)
This is why many desks will treat the tape as “wait and see” at first.
But the alternatives won’t disappear overnight. Most serious desks will run tape data alongside existing sources for a while, because the first year is always about validation, exceptions, and “why is this missing?”
The tape’s real competitive pressure is not that it replaces these. Commercial sources will still exist. It is that it standardises the minimum viable truth, which makes everything else easier to benchmark.
So what’s the true value of the tape?
If it lands well, the consolidated tape becomes:
a baseline truth for post-trade transparency
a catalyst for better analytics and benchmarking
a pressure mechanism on data quality and reporting behaviour
a leveller for smaller desks and challengers who can’t afford bespoke market data stacks
If it lands badly, it becomes:
a compliance utility you must buy, then ignore
a feed you can’t trust without heavy normalisation
a political trophy with limited operational impact
The real answer is annoyingly sensible. Wait and see, but don’t wait to prepare.
Because if your architecture assumes “we’ll plug it in later”, “later” becomes “never”, and you’ll still be arguing about timestamps in 2028.
The most rational stance is: Assume it becomes important. Do not assume it becomes excellent.