ESMA consults on the review of transparency requirements under MiFIR

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s securities markets regulator, has today launched a Consultation Paper on the review of the regulatory technical standards – RTS 1 equity and RTS 2 – non-equity transparency – on transparency requirements under the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR).

The Consultation Paper focuses on technical issues and addresses topics that do not require a prior change of MiFID II/MiFIR. The review includes:

providing more clarity on non-price forming transactions and the reporting of such transactions which will help obtain a better picture of the actual split between lit and over-the-counter (OTC) trading;

a recalibration of the regime for commodity derivatives ensuring better tailored transparency requirements for this class of derivatives);

providing further clarity on the reporting fields for post-trade transparency and the reporting of reference data with the overall objective of improving the quality of post-trade transparency data;

providing clarification on the pre-trade transparency requirements for new types of trading systems, i.e. frequent batch auctions and hybrid systems; and

increasing the pre- and post-trade large in scale thresholds for the trading of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) to achieve a more meaningful level of transparency in the ETF market.

This Consultation Paper reflects the findings and recommendations of various MiFID review reports published by ESMA in 2019 and 2020 as well as the feedback provided by stakeholders on necessary amendments to the two RTS over the last years. This includes the call for evidence published in 2020 as well as reflecting ESMA’s work on improving OTC data quality.

Next steps

We invite stakeholders, in particular investment firms, trading venues, and approved publication arrangements, to send us their feedback by 1 October 2021.

Further information:

Dan Nacu-Manole

Communications Officer

✆   +33 (0)1 58 36