REPU: Repo

What REPU means

In a repo one party sells securities for cash and agrees to buy them back later at an agreed price. The seller, who receives the cash, is on the repo side of the deal and flags its settlement instructions with REPU. Guidance from the ECB’s bilateral collateral management expert group (AMI-SeCo, 2020, using ICMA terms) sets it out: the seller sends a delivery with REPU for the opening leg and a receipt with REPU for the closing leg.

The buyer who provides the cash uses RVPO on both legs, so REPU and RVPO describe the same deal from its two ends. The code follows the party’s role, not the direction of each movement. A triparty repo, where an agent selects and moves the collateral, uses TRPO and TRVO. A sell/buy-back, which is two linked outright trades rather than a repo contract, uses SBBK from the same side.

A repo instruction can carry the second-leg terms in sequence D (Two Leg Transaction Details, block REPO): closing date :98a::TERM, second-leg reference :20C::SECO, repo rate :92A::REPO and termination amount :19A::TRTE. Later events on an open repo, such as a rate change, a rollover or a top-up, are flagged with :22F::REPT// codes (RATE, ROLP, TOPU, WTHD, CALL, CADJ, PAIR) in sequence E.

When you see it

• Opening leg: an MT543 deliver against payment with :22F::SETR//REPU from the cash taker, confirmed with an MT547.
• Closing leg: an MT541 receive against payment with REPU, sent as a separate instruction or generated by the account servicer from the sequence D details, confirmed with an MT545.
• In MT548 status advices and MT537 pending statements, where closing legs wait for their settlement date.

What to do next

• Use REPU when your side receives the cash and gives the securities; use RVPO if you provide the cash. Do not fall back to TRAD. Under EU CSDR, CSDs report settlement fails per type of transaction (purchase or sale, collateral management, securities lending and borrowing, repo, other), and custodians such as BNY pass the instructed SETR code to the CSD for that reporting. A financing or collateral movement sent as TRAD lands in the wrong bucket.
• Agree with your account servicer whether it wants the two legs as separate instructions or one instruction with sequence D. When it builds the closing leg from sequence D, a missing closing date or second-leg reference is a common reason for a repair status.
• In T2S the type is not a matching field, and the ECB expert group asked CSDs how often repos matched against the opposite type (REPU with RVPO) and how often against the same type, which shows that practice varies. Where SETR is matched, such as KDPW according to Clearstream, agree the code first; a mismatch shows as NMAT with reason SETR.
• Some custodians never apply automatic partial settlement to this type: BNY lists SECL, SECB, SLRE, SBRE, OWNI, TURN and the repo codes among the transactions it always instructs with NPAR.

Where it appears in MT and ISO 20022

Questions

What is the difference between REPU and RVPO?

Both describe the same repo. REPU is used by the party that sells the securities and receives the cash at the start; RVPO by the party that buys the securities and provides the cash. Each side keeps its code on the opening and the closing leg.

Which message do I send for each leg of a repo?

As cash taker (REPU) you deliver the securities on the opening leg, usually with an MT543, and receive them back on the closing leg with an MT541. Free of payment legs use MT542 and MT540. In ISO 20022 each leg is a sese.023 with SttlmParams/SctiesTxTp/Cd = REPU.

Should I use REPU or TRPO for a triparty repo?

Use TRPO when a triparty agent manages the collateral. REPU is for bilateral repos, where the two parties instruct the collateral movements themselves.

Related codes

• RVPOReverse Repo
• TRPOTriparty Repo
• TRVOTriparty Reverse Repo
• SBBKSell Buy Back
• BSBKBuy Sell Back
• COLOCollateral Out