The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published a speech given by its chairman Steven Maijoor. In his speech Mr Maijoor discusses ESMA’s response to the European Commission’s review of the European Supervisory Authorities and its general opinion on relocations from the UK to the EU27. In the final part of his speech Mr Maijoor provides an update on MiFID II / MiFIR implementation.
In relation to MiFID II / MiFIR Mr Maijoor states that:
- both pieces of EU legislation will come into effect on 3 January 2018. There will be no further delay in their implementation;
- ESMA is currently working on opinions on pre-trade transparency waivers for equity instruments, and will start working soon on opinions on position limits and waivers for non-equity instruments. ESMA expects to handle about 1,000 individual waiver notifications and about 100 notifications on position limits. The deadline for the submission of notifications for waivers of non-equity instruments to Member State national competent authorities (NCAs) has recently closed. These are being reviewed by NCAs before ESMA starts processing them in August 2017. This timeline will allow ESMA to process all applications by the end of November;
- ESMA is on track with all MiFID II / MiFIR IT projects, in particular the Financial Instruments Reference Data System, and the double volume cap mechanism;
- ESMA will publish at the beginning of July the transitional calculations for non-equity instruments specifying the large-in-scale (LIS) and size specific to the instruments (SSTI) thresholds for all instruments and the liquidity status of all instruments expect bonds, thereby providing more certainty on the new transparency regime and giving market participants half a year to prepare their systems. The publication of the transitional calculations on the liquidity status of bonds is scheduled for end November, and the beginning of December, as well the transitional calculations for most equity instruments; and
- ESMA is currently finalising a consultation paper on the trading obligation for derivatives. ESMA expects to publish this in the coming weeks and intends to deliver the draft regulatory technical standards to the European Commission in early autumn.
View ESMA speech on preparing for MiFID II, 7 June 2017
