According to the WSJ,
DTCC said regulators submitted 360 searches in May, the most recent month for which data is available, compared with 37 searches in the same month last year. In April, the number of searches rose to 579 from 77 a year earlier.
Search volumes into swaps trades spiked significantly in October, with 2,667 individual searches recorded; in February, with 1,027, and in March, with 1,173 searches, DTCC data show.
Stewart Macbeth, president and ceo of DTCC’s data warehouse unit DerivSERV, told reporters at a briefing in New York that regulators had initiated 3,296 individual searches between Jan. 1 and April 1, largely relating to CDS trades.
Forty regulatory agencies have access to the DTCC portal, and the data they see are either updated daily or weekly.
The DTCC’s warehouse went live with CDS data in 2006 and began making aggregate trade data publicly available in late 2008 following the financial crisis. It now covers 98% of the world’s CDS trades.
Since February 2011, regulators have been able to view more granular data, including the firms behind each trade and the nature and size of those individual transactions.
Most searches by market supervisors have been into CDS, Macbeth said.
The regulatory portal’s search function “is not necessarily used equally, but it is used by a number of authorities,” he added.