North American investment firms display a low level of confidence that they will be ready for Europe’s capital markets reforms.
A significant portion of participants in a survey indicated they were “somewhat or not at all confident” that they had a plan in place to meet the January 3, 2018 deadline for the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, known as MiFID II.
Simcorp, an investment management technology firm, surveyed 150 participants from 68 firms and almost 60% confirmed they needed to comply with the MiFID II, the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive.
Of those, 23% said they were “extremely confident” of having a plan and 77% were somewhat or not at all confident.
Just under 30% were unsure if and how their firm will be affected.
The survey revealed that participants felt complying with transaction reporting requirements, understanding the new market structure, and unbundling research costs from execution were the top operational challenges felt by the participants.
“MiFID II is one of the biggest pieces of regulation to ever hit the buy-side industry, so I am not surprised by the extent of uncertainty and concern reflected in the research and poll results,” said Gernot Schmidt, MiFID II product manager at SimCorp.
Simcorp conducted the survey in September and published the results today.
Last week, regulators moved to reduce some of the uncertainty for US firms about their MiFID II obligations surrounding broker research payments.
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