The various national filing systems of the the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) will be turned over to their new operator in mid October, the CSA said Monday.

The CSA announced that as of October12 CGI Information Systems and Management Consultants Inc. (CGI) will assume responsibility for hosting, running and maintaining the regulators various systems for filing insider reports, and making issuer and registration filings — the System for Electronic Document Analysis and Retrieval (SEDAR), the System for Electronic Disclosure by Insiders (SEDI) and the National Registration Database (NRD) — which are known collectively as the CSA National Systems.

The regulators said that the transition to CGI will take place over the weekend of Oct. 12, and that the systems will not be available that weekend. Firms that access these systems through virtual private networks (VPNs) will have to reconfigure their connections before this date; and, the regulators say that a CSA/CGI network transition team will work with firms to help make these changes.

Firms that file through SEDAR and currently have the SEDAR client software installed on their workstations will be provided with a software update to be installed after the transition, it notes.

Back in April, the CSA said that CGI had been selected to run the various systems for the next five years, with an option to extend the contract for a further three years after that. It expects to see cost savings under CGI’s management, along with new fee models for SEDAR and NRD, which should ultimately lead to lower costs for firms, too.