MSRB seeks issuer feedback on EMMA website redesign

Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board Chair Warren "Bo" Daniels urged issuers to provide feedback as the MSRB conducts beta testing for the newly redesigned Electronic Municipal Market Access (EMMA) website that it plans to launch by the end of this year.

Issuers "are super important to us," Daniels said in comments Monday during a debt committee meeting held as part of the Government Finance Officers Associations' 2025 Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C., explaining that MSRB wants to hear from issuers to ensure it is obtaining perspectives from across the various types of EMMA users.

"I can't emphasize that enough," the MSRB chair said.

Marcelo Vieira, MSRB's senior director of research and market transparency, said MSRB about three years ago undertook a significant industry engagement effort regarding EMMA.

"We wanted to know everything that there is to know about EMMA, what was working, what was not working," Vieira said, adding that MSRB reached out to more than 100 different stakeholders including issuers and was able to obtain insightful feedback and recommendations.

"Where we are now, is that we're working on those changes," he said, adding that MSRB is re-engineering the EMMA portal. "We are making sure that the efforts, the changes that we want to make to EMMA are based on input from the industry, like issuers, all kinds of stakeholders."

Currently, MSRB is testing the key features that it wants to implement, said Vieira, who referenced a screen displaying a list of key features that will be part of the new EMMA website.

"As you can see here, first on the list (is) issuer data clean-up," he said, adding that MSRB wanted to remove "some duplications that I'm sure you're all familiar with on EMMA" and improve how data is displayed.

Also on the features list of the new EMMA website is the addition of obligor information, when available.

"That was the most requested piece ofnew information when we went through our exercise to interview stakeholders," he said, adding that stakeholders wanted to know how to find obligor information on EMMA and how MSRB could make it easier for them to find it.

Also among the modernized EMMA website's key features will be an even more customizable issuer homepage.

"We wanted to give issuers a little more flexibility on how they can customize their page," he said, adding that the new website will allow an issuer to add its own description to its homepage and perhaps even a picture of its municipality.

The newly modernized EMMA website will also offer a way for users to customize their experience, allowing them to find the information that interests them without having to navigate through multiple pages, Vieira said. While some users visit EMMA once or twice a year, others use it daily, he said.

"So we wanted to provide our users the capability of customizing their experience," Vieira said.

MSRB contacted the participants who helped it three years ago and has also had others reach out to it with various recommendations regarding the redesign, he said. Today it has more than 50 testers.

Testing is an important component of the process, Vieira said.

"We need feedback, we want feedback," he said, adding that stakeholder feedback will enable the MSRB to make the necessary changes.