The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has updated the “Submitter User Guide for the National Storage Mechanism (NSM)” and “Technical Guidelines for the Preparation and Submission of Structured Annual Financial Reports to the FCA” in the 2023 year which can influence the submission of the ESEF reports for the LSE issuers.

Now the authorisation rules have been enhanced and users have to go through multi-factor authentication. Here is a guidance for the authorisation. We strongly recommend registering for MFA in advance, to prevent any problems related to document submission to the NSM.

In addition, the number of login attempts decreased to three times with a further subsequent account block of 20 minutes. In the case of further unsuccessful login attempts, the account will be locked; only the NSM support team will be able to unlock it. Please take this into account if you plan last-minute submission.

The technical guide emphasises two important updates:

The limit for the ESEF report archive was decreased to 100 MB. We suggest making a preliminary check of the ESEF report archive size to ensure that the final document will comply with FCA requirements.

New reports have to be prepared based on the XHTML document. Hitherto, the issuer could choose between HTML and XHTML formats. Now most conversion software operates with the XHTML format, but it will be a good practice to check the conversion format in advance.

The changes are not dramatic but require from the issuer some preliminary checks of the reporting workflow to ensure smooth and timely submission of the annual financial report to LSE.

Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) updates in 2023