Following the political agreement reached in trilogues on the Investment Firms Review package yesterday, Pablo Portugal, Managing Director of Advocacy, said:

“We welcome that the provisional agreement retains the current scope of services covered under the EU third country equivalence regime for investment firms. Removing key services such as dealing on own account and underwriting from the cross-border provision of MiFID services would have severely restricted the EU regime for market participants to access liquidity and services provided from outside the EU.”

“The equivalence framework has been significantly amended with the inclusion of provisions allowing the European Commission to apply specific operational conditions to an equivalence decision where the activities performed by third country firms are likely to be of systemic importance. It is important that these and other amendments serve to preserve the integrity of EU markets and the benefits of open, competitive and globally integrated financial markets, and are exercised appropriately.”

“We look forward to analysing the details of the agreement in other important areas.”