The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s financial markets regulator and supervisor, published today the Final Report with proposals for amendments related to equity transparency under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II). Through its proposals ESMA aims to contribute to a more informative pre-trade and post-trade transparency regime.
The report includes proposals for the amendment of the regulatory technical standards (RTS) as well as technical advice (TA) on the provisions on equity transparency, covering:
Changes to the definition of a liquid market for equity instrument;
Specification of information to be disclosed for pre-trade transparency purposes, which is also of relevance for the equity consolidated tape;
Review of the pre-trade transparency requirements for Systematic Internalisers (SIs), including the calibration of two quoting sizes.; and
Post-trade transparency reports, including flags for equity instruments.
In addition, the RTS and TA include changes related to the discontinuation of reporting of data for the purpose of transparency calculations. Going forward, ESMA will perform these calculations using transaction data reported under Article 26 of MiFIR. By removing this reporting obligation and the reuse of the other already reported data, ESMA aims at reducing the reporting burden for market participants.
Similar amendments will be proposed in early 2025 for the volume cap mechanism.