On Wednesday 8 or Wednesday 14 March, the European Commission will propose new draft technical standards aiming to clarify the revised 'Priips' regulation on pre-contractual information allowing retail investors to compare certain financial products, such as UCITS investment funds or insurance products.
The European institution has announced that this second draft text is likely to mollify the concerns raised by the European Parliament, which rejected a first draft in September 2016 (see EUROPE 11624). In particular, it explains that it has kept a high degree of comparability between different retail financial products covered by the regulation, the entry into force of which has been postponed until January 2018.
At the Parliament, the political groups do not seem ready to go into battle again. The aim now seems to be to conclude the dossier as quickly and as honourably as possible, to allow the technical standards to enter into force at the same time as the revised 'Priips' regulation. “Nobody is entirely satisfied, but we are no longer as dissatisfied as we were last year”, a parliamentary source told us. The ECR and ALDE groups, however, feel that they did not have enough input in the discussions between the Commission and Parliament on putting together the second draft version of the technical standards. The Liberals unsuccessfully raised the issue of insurance funds in euro, which could be considered riskier than UCITS investment funds. (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)