On 27 July 2022, the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ) published an Opinion of the European Central Bank (ECB) of 1 June 2022  on the proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council, amending Regulation (EU) 600/2014 as regards enhancing market data transparency, removing obstacles to the emergence of a consolidated tape, optimising trading obligations and prohibiting receiving payments for forwarding client orders. The opinion follows requests from the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union.

Within the opinion, the ECB makes some general observations regarding the objectives of the proposal, including that:

  • The ECB welcomed the main objective of the proposed regulation to amend Regulation (EU) No 600/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council in order to enhance market data transparency across EU trading venues by creating a new regulatory framework for the production of a ‘consolidated tape’ for trade data, including a new process for selecting a single consolidated tape provider for each asset class.
  • The ECB strongly supports the general aim of further supporting capital markets integration, in particular through the proposed enhancements to market data transparency. Deeper and more integrated capital markets are needed from several perspectives
  • The ECB reiterates the importance of promptly adopting the further initiatives under the European Commission’s 2020 Capital Markets Union (CMU) action plan as well as fully implementing them, where that is legally required at national level.
  • The ECB is specifically interested in these legislative proposals in view of the European System of Central Banks’s (ESCB) participation in the non-equity (bond, including sovereign bond) markets in the performance of the ESCB’s monetary policy and other Treaty-mandated tasks and in view of the need to safeguard the confidentiality of such sensitive transactions. Therefore, the ECB would additionally like to comment on other provisions of MiFIR which, although not the subject of the proposed regulation, affect ESCB central banks and their market transactions in financial instruments.