On Monday 5 June, the Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament’s negotiating team, led by Arba Kokalari (EPP, Swedish), and the European Commission will enter the thick of interinstitutional negotiations (trilogue) over the May 2022 proposal for a directive on distance contracts for financial services, which aims to adapt the obsolete Directive 2022/65/EC – which it will repeal – to the digitisation of the market (see EUROPE 12950/4).
The Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper), who met on Wednesday 31 May in Brussels, discussed the issues to be addressed at this second trilogue on the basis of the general approach of the EU Council (see EUROPE 13133/2) and the progress made at a technical level since the presentation of the respective positions in April (see EUROPE 13169/10).
As both the European Parliament and EU Council have agreed to include a chapter on financial services in the Consumer Rights Directive (2011/83/EU), the political negotiations in the second trilogue will focus on four points, namely:
- the deadlines for transposing the future directive into national law;
- online advertising, to determine whether to include provisions on this subject in the directive or to refer to the DSA (Digital Service Act) or other legislation. The European Parliament, for its part, is particularly ambitious in that it wants any person or company wishing to advertise a financial services product on social media to be required to visibly indicate whether they have the requisite skills (see EUROPE 13151/9);
- the level of harmonisation: some Member States who have more protective legislation on pre-contractual consumer information are in favour of minimum harmonisation in order to go further than the future directive, while the Parliament favours total harmonisation for the proper functioning of the single market in financial services;
- penalties for those who fail to comply with the provisions of the future directive. (Original version in French by Aminata Niang)