On Monday, 20 April, BETTER FINANCE and the platform AGE Europe warned that rejecting the draft Regulatory Technical Standards (RTS) on the key information document (KID) for packaged retail and insurance-based investment products (PRIIPS) would have “highly detrimental consequences” for European savers.
In an open letter addressed to the European Commission and the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON), they indicate that they support the efforts of the European financial supervisory authorities (ESAs) in the context of these RTS to remedy the shortcomings in the current KID, which they describe as “wrong, highly misleading, not intelligible, [and] not comparable”.
Both organisations are in fact reacting to an early April letter from Sven Giegold (Greens/EFA, Germany), Jonás Fernández (S&D, Spain), and Sirpa Pietikäinen (EPP, Finland), in which these MEPs expressed their concerns about the draft texts and threatened to oppose them (see EUROPE 12465/18).
The MEPs criticise the use of past-performance indicators, which would be included in the ESAs’ draft RTS, instead of future performance scenarios, as provided for in the PRIIPS regulation. In their opinion, this would have a tendency to project past performance directly into the future, which is misleading.
For their part, BETTER FINANCE and the platform AGE Europe believe that future performance scenarios based on the last five years’ data are unreliable for consumers and constitute “a triumph of pseudoscience over common sense”.
See the letter: https://bit.ly/2RRD4of (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)