Recital 4 Technology neutral standard templates

Certain sector-specific Union financial services legislation contains requirements on outsourcing. Those requirements have been further developed in guidelines issued by the ESAsEuropean Supervisory Authority. Under those guidelines, some financial entitiesas defined in Article 2, points (a) to (t) are expected to record specific information on their outsourcing arrangements, in some cases also in the form of registers, as part of their outsourcing risk management. In recent years, several national competent authoritiesas defined in Article 46 and the ECB have collected information included in such registers as part of their supervision of financial entity compliance with the outsourcing requirements. Based on the lessons learned from the different data collection exercises of outsourcing registers performed in the recent years by the ESAsEuropean Supervisory Authority and competent authoritiesas defined in Article 46, the standard templates should be designed in a technology-neutral manner with open tables, which have a predefined number of columns and an indefinite number of rows. In addition, the standard templates should be linked to one another by using different specific keys forming a relational structure between those templates.