To help inform the debate surrounding the UK’s EU Referendum, AFME asked the leading law firm Clifford Chance to produce a report ‘The UK Referendum: Challenges for Europe’s Capital Markets: A legal and regulatory assessment’. This document provides a detailed, fact-based analysis of the issues European capital markets will face in the event of the UK leaving the EU.

In particular, the report focuses on ‘passporting’, which enable banks in one EU country to provide cross-border services to clients elsewhere in the single market. As the report highlights, in the event of a UK exit, global banks based in the UK would lose their rights as EU firms to ‘passport’ their services to the rest of the EU under existing legislation, such as MiFID and CRD. Any replacement trade agreement or ‘third country’ arrangement would have the potential to restrict cross-border trading.