United Kingdom (and EU regulation)

ESMA 2017 work programme

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its 2017 work programme. ESMA’s key areas of work will focus on:

supervisory convergence. The implementation of MiFID II and MiFIR will continue to be ESMA’s first priority area for converging supervisory practices. This will include associated IT projects relating to MiFID II and the Market Abuse Regulation;
assessing risks. In producing databases required by legislation, ESMA will deal with increasing volumes of data, where the focus will be on data quality. Specifically, ESMA will consider the opportunities for conducting stress tests of investment funds on a pan-EU basis and the potential methodologies to be used in such an exercise;
single rulebook. ESMA has outstanding tasks relating to the completion of a Single Rulebook for EU financial markets. For example ESMA’s level 2 work under the Benchmarks Regulation is due to be delivered by 1 April 2017. ESMA will also continue to contribute to the Capital Markets Union initiative, including work on prospectuses and securitisation, as well as possible initiatives relating to investment funds; and
direct supervision. ESMA will increase its use of supervisory and ESMA databases to conduct targeted reviews, including on-site investigations for both credit rating agencies (CRA) and trade repositories (TR). ESMA will also focus on CRA and TR ancillary activities. In addition, in 2017 ESMA expects to begin processing applications for registrations for the reporting of securities financing transactions.