Most finance firms are now on track with their
preparations for compliance with the Markets in Financial
Instruments Directive (MiFID), a new survey has
revealed.
MiFID, which comes into force next year, is regarded as the
biggest change in the European financial services industry for over
a decade.
The directive presents a compliance challenge for IT
departments, which are already battling to meet the requirements of
the Basel II capital accord, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and
International Financial Reporting Standards.
But a survey of 230 executives from finance firms in 12 European
countries found that 84% of respondents said their firm was on
track with its MiFID preparation.
Just 12% reported that their firm had not understood the
directive or was actively opposing it, the research by analyst
TradeTech and financial services software provider SunGard
found.
Amaury de Ternay, head of global trading with French bank BNP
Paribas’s asset management division said, “With MiFID we are
observing an evolution that is quite rare: total coherence between
the technological evolution of the market and the regulatory
evolution.”
But more than half of those surveyed said the help they were
receiving from their national regulator was “bad” or “very bad”,
the researchers found.
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