The market for investment products, including both securities and investment funds, is fraught with difficulties for consumers in terms of the ease of comparing products, trust in suppliers and consumer satisfaction. A comprehensive approach to investor protection, developed around the lifecycle...

After more than a decade of indecision, the EU is finally now set to implement a consistent regulatory architecture for clearing and settlement. Following the agreement on a European market infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), the European Commission has proposed harmonised rules for centralised...

As part of the European Union’s commitment to deliver greater access to finance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), EU policy-makers will have to deal with a fragmented market landscape and responses by individual member states to address failures. On the basis of some early...

Over the past five years, the OTC derivatives market showed an impressive resilience in levels of market activity, which are now above pre-crisis levels in outstanding notional value. This confirms its systemic importance. Current volatility of the gross market values and gross credit exposures...

This report summarises the main results of a survey conducted by the European Capital Markets Institute (ECMI) during the period December 2009 - July 2010. The survey aims to investigate the actual implementation of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), two years after it came...

Now that the worst of the financial storm is over, regulators are setting new strategies to deal with the systemic importance of the €427 trillion ($604 trillion) over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market. This paper explores the three major sources of disruptive effects in OTC derivatives:...

In their assessment of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), adopted in April 2004 and implemented at Member State level by the end of 2007, Karel Lannoo and Diego Valiante find that the legislation has been remarkably successful in terms of improving market structure and...

As discussions around the revision of MiFID are heating up, this paper tries to set a new regulatory and institutional framework for multilateral and bilateral execution mechanisms of complex financial instruments, such as over-the-counter derivatives and fixed income products. The author argues...

ESMA, the European watchdog of securities markets, has announced its intention to take a closer look at so-called ‘closet trackers’, with a view to identify whether there is a potential need for a coordinated pan-European policy response to these particular funds, which are supposedly...

This paper maps the initiatives to support access to finance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that were available at national level in 2012 in the five biggest European economies (Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Spain). This mapping distinguishes initiatives promoted and...