On 15 October 2025, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a Final Report on supervisory expectations for the management body.

Background

On 8 July 2024, ESMA published a Consultation Paper on its proposed supervisory expectations for the governance arrangements of supervised entities. The Final Report now published includes a feedback statement, a cost-benefit analysis and ESMA’s revised supervisory expectations that have been developed taking into account the feedback received.

Principles

Based on the consultation feedback, ESMA has made a number of revisions to the structure and content of the supervisory expectations which is further explained in the Final Report. Notably, it has transformed the guidance into a set of 12 high-level principles, which it expects entities to build on in order to enhance their governance and oversight arrangements.

Next steps

The supervisory expectations are relevant to all firms directly supervised by ESMA. ESMA intends to use these principles as the basis for its supervisory engagements with entities. Currently, these are administrators of EU critical benchmarks and third-country recognised benchmarks, Tier 2 central counterparties, credit rating agencies, Data Reporting Service Providers, securitisation repositories and trade repositories.