On 1 September 2010 the FSA's Document Viewing Facility (DVF) was replaced by an online facility, the National Storage Mechanism (NSM).
The NSM will store all information required to be disclosed under the Listing Rules, Disclosure and Transparency Rules and Prospectus Rules i.e. all information previously forwarded for publication on the DVF plus all regulatory announcements.
The NSM is provided by Morningstar plc, and is located at www.hemscott.com/nsm.do. Users will be able to search announcements and documents by a number of criteria including company name, headline code, type of document or date, and then view and/or print the relevant item free of charge.
The key implications for issuers are as follows:
- the requirement under the FSA rules to forward two hard copies of documents to the FSA for publication through the DVF should be fulfilled by forwarding them to the NSM electronically – either via email or by using Morningstar's upload facility;
- submission of a document to the NSM does not comply with a requirement to make information public; a Regulatory Information Service (RIS) must still be used for the purposes of disseminating information to the public;
- all regulatory announcements that are required to be published via an RIS will be automatically received by Morningstar via regulatory feeds and stored within the NSM. When making regulatory announcements issuers should use the correct category and headline code to enable NSM users to search for announcements quickly and accurately; and
- all prospectuses approved by the UKLA will be directly accessible online by the public; issuers will require to consider the implications of this when drafting prospectus disclaimer wording.
View the FSA's FAQs on the NSM (webpage).