The European Single Access Point—a new information obligation for insurers

06.03.2025 insurance

Insurance and reinsurance companies should soon prepare to comply with a major new regulatory obligation, to transmit data to ESAP. The proposal for implementing this change in Poland has been released on the website of the Government Legislation Centre.

The legislative proposal (no. UC73) would amend 17 different laws, including key statutes for the functioning of the financial sector in Poland, which of course applies to the insurance market.

The proposed changes to Polish law arise from entry into force of EU rules for establishment of the European Single Access Point (ESAP) and are intended to implement Directive (EU) 2024/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 February 2024 amending Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments (known as MiFID 2).

Changes are planned in the following Polish laws:

Accounting Act of 29 September 1994
National Court Register Act of 20 August 1997
Act on Organisation and Operation of Pension Funds of 28 August 1997
Banking Law of 29 August 1997
Act on Mortgage Bonds and Mortgage Banks of 29 August 1997
Commercial Companies Code of 15 September 2000
Act on Investment Funds and Management of Alternative Investment Funds of 27 May 2004
Act on Supplementary Supervision of Credit Institutions, Insurance Companies, Reinsurance Companies, and Investment Firms in a Financial Conglomerate of 15 April 2005
Act on Public Offerings, Conditions for Introduction of Financial Instruments into an Organised Trading System and on Public Companies of 29 July 2005
Capital Market Supervision Act of 29 July 2005
Trading in Financial Instruments Act of 29 July 2005
Financial Market Supervision Act of 21 July 2006
Act on Macroprudential Supervision of the Financial System and Crisis Management in the Financial System of 5 August 2015
Insurance and Reinsurance Activity Act of 11 September 2015
Act on the Bank Guarantee Fund, the Deposit Guarantee System, and Compulsory Restructuring of 10 June 2016
Act on Auditors, Audit Firms and Public Supervision of 11 May 2017
Insurance Distribution Act of 15 December 2017.

The ESAP Package

The EU provisions making up the ESAP Package include:

Directive (EU) 2023/2864 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2023 amending certain Directives as regards the establishment and functioning of the European single access point
Regulation (EU) 2023/2859 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2023 establishing a European single access point providing centralised access to publicly available information of relevance to financial services, capital markets and sustainability
Regulation (EU) 2023/2869 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 December 2023 amending certain Regulations as regards the establishment and functioning of the European single access point.

These rules are expected to result in a systematic source of publicly available information on entities and products relevant to financial services, capital markets and sustainability, including financial market entities and investment products from the EU, regardless of their location and origin within the Union.

The ESAP aims to reduce barriers to digital access to information, increase flows of information within the EU, and foster digital use of information, helping integrate financial services and capital markets and better allocate capital across the EU.

The ESAP will be run by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA).

Operation of ESAP

The ESAP will be an online platform containing financial and non-financial information on individual entities, which in principle will be accessible by anyone without fees or licences.

There are exceptions to this rule, but the obligation to pay fees will apply only to users who search and download large amounts of information. The amount of the fees will not be allowed to exceed ESMA’s costs of providing the information.

The detailed arrangements for fees, including their structure and the nature and scope of services for which fees may be charged, will be established in the implementing technical standards developed by the ESMA.

The ESAP will be primarily intended for investors, financial analysts and brokers, but will also provide access to information for researchers and private individuals.

Technical requirements

The proposed provisions will specify technical requirements for the data to be transmitted. The information made available on the ESAP must be prepared in the appropriate format and accompanied by the relevant metadata before being released.

The entities required to provide information in the ESAP will prepare information in a data extraction (download) format or machine-readable format. Two groups of formats will be applied, depending on the type of information. The list of acceptable formats and characteristics will be defined in executive technical standards developed by the European supervisory authorities. The metadata will be appropriate to the type of information, but in each case, for a financial market entity, will include:

The name of the entity
In the case of a legal entity, an identifier in accordance with the implementing technical standards
The type of information, in accordance with the implementing technical standards
An indication of whether the information contains personal data (which is necessary to determine the data retention period in the ESAP).

Necessary involvement of national authorities

The EU provisions also require designation of national authorities to carry out the tasks of data collectors. The obligated entities will provide the required information to these national authorities, which in turn will post the information to the ESAP, using a dedicated IT infrastructure.

In Poland, under the proposal, the authorities collecting data for the ESAP, depending on the data in question, will be the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF), the Bank Guarantee Fund (BFG), the Polish Agency for Audit Oversight (PANA), the National Court Register (KRS) Information Centre, and the National Council of Auditors (KRBR).

Some of the information published in the ESAP will be provided not by the entity itself, but by the national authority, which will also be the data collector (e.g. information on sanctions imposed on entities, or identification of systemically critical institutions). In this case, the authority will post the information in the ESAP.

The proposal is expected to be adopted by the Council of Ministers in the second quarter of 2025, followed by submission to the parliament for further legislative work.

Mateusz Kosiorowski, adwokat, Klaudiusz Mikołajczyk, Insurance practice, Wardyński & Partners