European Union set for finance directive

But firms will have to move fast to comply with Mifid guidelines

Mifid deadline is November 1st 2007

Final guidelines for the European financial services directive were issued last week, just five months before the deadline.

Firms have until November to meet the requirements of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (Mifid), which aims to create a single, cross-European market to allow faster and cheaper share transactions.

Implementation has been held up because the Committee of European Securities Regulator (CESR) has only just finalised the details of the plans. The Financial Services Authority (FSA), the UK watchdog charged with implementing Mifid, could not issue its finalised rulebook before all the particulars were in place.

‘The CESR guidelines have slightly held up implementation – this is partly because reaching an agreement between all 27 European Union members is not easy,’ said an FSA spokesman.

The UK-specific FSA rules are now expected in July.

But even last week’s clarifications do not fill in all the blanks, says Tim Clark, head of equity technology at Citibank.

‘There are still particular areas that are not as clear as they ought to be,’ he said.

‘For example, trade and transaction reporting – the exact messages we will need to send, how, and what fields and contexts we will have to use.’

The major technology challenge presented by Mifid is to anticipate how data volumes will increase with the opening up of European trading, says Clark.

‘We will have to connect with more markets and will have greater volumes of data passing across multiple avenues, so we will have to think more about smart order routing than single exchange connections,’ he said.

The FSA has a less prescriptive approach to Mifid than European counterparts, which will help the UK’s financial centre maintain its lead, says Gartner analyst Peter Redshaw.

‘London has the advantage that the FSA will not require gold-plated compliance, which means no extra requirements on top of the European directive,’ said Redshaw.

‘We have a lot of the regulations already fulfilled and will achieve compliance faster because London has been a competitive market for some time,’ he said.