A one-year delay to the implementation of MiFID II/MiFIR is widely anticipated following a number of presentations and petitioning by regulatory officials at the European Securities and Markets Authority and the European Commission.
While details of the delay are yet to be confirmed, politicians who had previously resisted calls for a postponement conceded at the end of November that a delay of a one year for the directive to come into force was necessary.
In exchange, they called for a swift finalization of regulatory technical standards, the detailed rules needed to implement the legislation. In an official statement, Markus Ferber, the European Parliament's rapporteur for MiFID II, said the Commission and ESMA “need to come up with a clear roadmap on the expected implementation work and especially for setting up the IT systems." He added that he expects the Parliament to be informed regularly and comprehensively about any progress in the implementation work.
Ferber also sent a letter to Jonathan Hill, the European Commissioner for financial services issues, setting out remaining concerns with MiFID II that have yet to be addressed in a satisfactory manner by ESMA. They include position limits, non-equity transparency, ancillary exemptions for commodity trading, and package transactions.
Ferber’s statement followed a number of meetings in Brussels during which senior officials from ESMA and the Commission said that the current January 2017 deadline was not achievable. “It will take some time, and well into 2016, before the text of the RTS [regulatory technical standards] will be stable and final. The building of some complex IT systems can only really take off when the final details are firmly set in the RTS and some of the most complex IT systems would need at least a year to be built,” said ESMA Chairman Steven Maijoor.
