Ranks of cross-border issues swell
- Christian Voigt, Senior Regulatory Adviser at Fidessa
- 02.07.2015 01:00 am regulatory , payments , Christian is a Senior Regulatory Adviser at Fidessa. He focuses on the growing regulatory and functional requirements for multi-asset automated trading systems, supporting Fidessa's clients across Europe in meeting these challenges. Christian was previously a Vice President at Deutsche Börse AG, responsible for business development in the institutional equity markets. He began his career as a scholar at the European Business School in Germany, where he obtained his doctorate and published several papers on empirical issues in Market Microstructure.
Payment for research and unbundling has been on the European regulatory agenda for some time. It has now escalated to a cross-border issue after concerns were raised with the US SEC by a senior US politician worried about the impact on US growth industries. The recent past gives us plenty of examples of cross-border issues from both sides of the Atlantic – the US person under Dodd-Frank, the proposed QMTF for European firms, the recognition of US CCPs under EMIR, or the question of whether the “exemption from the exemption” implies that all DMA users across the globe fall within the scope of MiFID II.
This list is likely to grow once MiFID II details are finalised within the next couple of months, as local regulators tussle with the reality of global markets. However, as long as the political will to recognise equivalence between jurisdictions is lacking, and common sense is not allowed to prevail, rules will only get more complex. CFTC Commissioner Giancarlohit the nail on the head when commenting on the recently proposed rules for cross-border margins, cheerfully pointing towards the expected growth in the US economy due to “thousands of billable hours that will be expended by lawyers and other professionals, who will have to read, interpret and respond to this tangled regulatory construct “. Something of a boost to economic growth, but possibly not the kind we were hoping for.
