The Commission has proposed a one year extension to the entry into application of the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID II.
This is to take account of the exceptional technical implementation challenges faced by regulators and market participants. The European Commission has today proposed granting national competent authorities and market participants one additional year to comply with the rules set out in the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, known as MiFID II. The new deadline is 3 January 2018.
The reason for the extension lies in the complex technical infrastructure that needs to be set up for the MiFID II package to work effectively. The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has to collect data from about 300 trading venues on about 15 million financial instruments. To achieve this result, ESMA must work closely with national competent authorities and the trading venues themselves. However, the European Commission was informed by ESMA that neither competent authorities, nor market participants, would have the necessary systems ready by 3 January 2017, the date by which the MiFID II package was initially scheduled to become operational. In light of these exceptional circumstances and in order to avoid legal uncertainty and potential market disruption, an extension was deemed necessary.
Source: European Commission – Press release 2016