Past Events
The use of central counterparties (CCPs) has increased markedly in recent years. The decision to shift from bilateral to central clearing of standardised over-the-counter derivatives concentrates risks in a couple of CCPs, which has potentially negative effects on the financial sector and the broader economy in the unlikely event that a CCP fails.
Between 2011 and 2015, global investment in FinTech increased eightfold. Resulting from the use of enabling digital technologies, new products and processes are being developed by “traditional” providers and by ever-rising numbers of FinTech startups. While policy-makers are gradually creating the necessary conditions to strengthen this digital transformation of financial services, numerous policy issues and unanswered questions remain. Against that background, CEPS, ECRI and ECMI are jointly organising their Annual Conference on “Developing the FinTech ecosystem: the challenges of regulation, innovation and digitalisation”.
Under MiFID I transparency requirements were limited to equity instruments. MiFID II substantially expanded the scope of this transparency to cover also non-equity instruments. The full list includes shares; depositary receipts; exchange traded funds; certificates and similar instruments (equity-like instruments); bonds; structured finance products; emission allowances and traded derivatives (non-equity instruments). Such instruments can be traded not only on regulated markets (RMs), but also to multilateral trading facilities (MTFs), organised trading facilities (OTFs), and Systemic Internalisers (SIs). It remains to be seen how and to what extent the new transparency requirements will affect the current market structure.
The European Capital Markets Institute (ECMI) invites industry representatives, policymakers, investor associations, academics and other interested stakeholders to take part in a series of special events on the topic of MiFID 2/MiFIR to discuss the readiness of market players and the supervisory community to comply with the provisions set out in new legislative framework.
The Capital Markets Union (CMU) Action Plan set out a programme of actions aiming at overcoming information barriers that prevent SMEs and prospective investors from identifying new opportunities to secure funding and to make investments, respectively.
- Strengthening the feedback given by banks when turning down credit applications from SMEs, in order to allow rejected SMEs to adjust their business model to have better access to external funding;
- Mapping local or national support and advisory structures across the EU to promote best practices in assisting SMEs; and
- Investigating how to develop or support pan-European information systems that link up national systems to bring finance-seeking SMEs together with finance providers
From a historical perspective, interest rates have been on a downward trend over the past four decades. In Europe, the financial and sovereign debt crises and the ensuing weak macroeconomic environment – persistent output gap, low growth and excessively low inflation – together with the expansionary monetary policy responses, in particular QE, have contributed to a further decline in interest rates.
The Annual Conference of the European Capital Markets Institute (ECMI) is a landmark event in Brussels, bringing together policy-makers, academics and international experts to discuss salient issues in the integration of EU capital markets and global financial reform.
Financial market infrastructures (FMIs) are the backbone of the financial system: they enable market participants to transact with one another in an efficient manner. FMIs are inherently systemic, as their very names imply: payments systems, central securities depositories (CSDs), securities settlement systems (SSSs), central counterparties (CCPs) and trade repositories (TRs).
The financial sector is no stranger to innovation. Nevertheless, over the past few years, the exponential growth of FinTech companies suggests that more disruptive changes will be required in order to bring the financial system fully into the 21st century.