Alongside the priorities already set for 2017, and which will remain relevant in 2018, the European Securities and Market Authority (ESMA) has added Brexit as a priority area of its working programme for the year to come.
“2018 promises to be a significant year in terms of our supervisory convergence work”, said ESMA's Chair, Steven Maijoor, on Wednesday 7 February, at the occasion of the publication of the programme.
Following on from work initiated last year, ESMA will continue to ensure that the revised directive on the financial instruments market (MiFID II) is applied effectively and coherently across the EU, to improve the quality of data in order to ensure effective reporting and to remove the remaining obstacles to the provision of cross-border services.
However, ESMA also stresses that it “stands ready to facilitate coordinated action to address important challenges arising from the UK's withdrawal from the EU”.
More specifically, it stresses that the supervisory coordination network would continue its ex-ante examination of specific cases of delocalisations to feed into a common supervisory approach, in particular concerning externalisation and delegation.
The approaches of the national competent authorities (NCA) to the emergency plans of businesses will continue to be a subject of discussions, as will the possibility of 'cliff-edge effects' and risks relevant to the markets. The authority is not ruling out issuing new supervisory guidelines and direct communications to investors concerning this.
Although ESMA is currently working on the principle that the UK will become a third country following its withdrawal from the EU, it stresses that “depending on the progress made in the negotiations between the EU of 27 and the UK, the need may arise to look at the cooperation arrangements between the UK and the EU27 NCAs and as well as ESMA”.
FinTech. Another subject making its debut in the authority's programme of work for 2018 is financial technology. ESMA anticipates a rapid development of innovations on the European financial markets in 2018 and intends to analyse the emergence of various instruments, such as virtual currencies and 'distributed ledger technologies'. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)