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The Treasury Department's Office of Financial Research disclosed the names of nine banks that it is using to collect data on a piece of Wall Street plumbing that gained notoriety in the financial crisis.

The OFR said the data-collection pilot on repurchase agreements, or repos, announced a few months ago is being conducted with Bank of America Corp., Barclays PLC, Deutsche Bank AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., HSBC Holdings PLC, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC and UBS Group AG.

The Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission are working with the OFR to conduct the pilot program.

"The project marks the first time the OFR went directly to industry to collect financial market information," it said in the statement. "But participation in the pilot project was voluntary, and participating companies provided input on what data should be gathered."

The Journal earlier reported the participation by Morgan Stanley in the study.

The disclosure of the full panel of banks involved comes as the OFR on Tuesday posted instructions for how the banks would submit their information on trades into the survey. Bank holding companies, for example, are asked to submit separate data for U.S. broker dealer subsidiaries that they own or control to avoid double-counting.

The OFR's mission is to collect data on so-called "bilateral" repos, or short-term loans between financial institutions that are backed by securities but aren't routed through a clearing agent. Such bilateral trades have been hard for international regulators to monitor because they are one-to-one negotiated trades that typically don't involve the use of industry clearing companies.

In January, the Fed and OFR referenced the data pilot in a joint research paper, saying they were looking for "permanent granular" measures on the bilateral corner of the circa $3 trillion repo market for which data has been challenging to collect. More comprehensive data already exist on the repos that involve third-party clearing firms for settlement, called tri-party repos.

Stacey Schreft, deputy director for research and analysis at the OFR, said in a brief on the pilot that it could produce the "first statistics" on the bilateral repos that are estimated at around $1.8 trillion.

Regulators care about better monitoring of the overall repos, including bilateral trades, because the market is at the center of how cash and securities are channeled through Wall Street firms. "During the financial crisis, distress hit the repo market and fed back into other parts of the financial system," Ms. Schreft wrote in her brief.

In an OFR meeting of the Financial Research Advisory Committee last summer, two OFR researchers said data gathered from a 2014 project involving the Securities and Exchange Commission had been "inconsistent" in part because trading firms suffered from a "lack of standard identifiers" and their "recording systems were inaccurate or incomplete."

The Fed, OFR and SEC are now working on a second pilot program focused on securities-lending transactions.

Write to Katy Burne at katy.burne@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 01, 2016 14:55 ET (19:55 GMT)

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