The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) today issued an update about SEDAR+, the new system that will be used by all market participants to file, disclose and search for issuer information in Canada’s capital markets, which had a planned launch date of June 13, 2023. The CSA now intends to launch SEDAR+ on July 25, 2023, with a contingency date in September.
The SEDAR+ system itself is functioning well. However, the process of assuring quality migration of large volumes of data from multiple legacy systems is taking longer than planned. The SEDAR+ project leadership team has added an additional six weeks to the project timeline to ensure that the data migration meets the CSA’s strict quality control standards.
CSA leadership is taking a prudent approach to mitigate the risk associated with this complex endeavour. If work on the data migration is not complete in time for the July launch, the CSA has also set September 12, 2023 as a contingency date. To assist filing organizations with planning for SEDAR+, the CSA will confirm the SEDAR+ go-live date by the end of June.
Until SEDAR+ goes live, all capital market participants are required to continue using SEDAR and the other systems in current use. Importantly, the flat-fee model announced on March 23, 2023, which reduces overall annual system fee costs by seven per cent, will still come into effect on June 9, 2023 and will apply to all SEDAR and National Registration Database (NRD) filings. Details about how to apply the flat-fee model in SEDAR will be added to the SEDAR+ Launch page on June 5, 2023.
On June 8, 2023, the CSA and member jurisdictions will issue a CSA Notice and Blanket Orders to support the date change. In the meantime, market participants can visit the SEDAR+ Launch page on the CSA website for more information, including the revised cutover period dates.
The CSA apologizes for any inconvenience caused by the launch deferral.
