EMIR: A Fair Price for Safety and Transparency - speech by Steven Maijoor, ESMA Chair, at the EMIR conference in the Hague

Keynote Speech - The reform of financial markets: halfway there Steven Maijoor, ESMA Chair AFME Post Trade Conference, London Excerpt "Three challenges Ladies and gentlemen, so far so good about the completion of the legislation to meet our G20 commitments and developing a single rulebook for financial services. Let me now turn to the three main challenges I see in the current phase of regulatory reform. My main message is that while the legislative phase nears completion, it does not imply the completion of the regulatory reform programme. Let me explain that further by identifying three commitments for the next phase of regulatory reform. Firstly, commitment to the financial reform, its implementation and to adequate supervision. Legislation needs to be accompanied by good implementing measures, to ensure the legislation works in practice, and credible supervision. Secondly, a commitment to supervisory convergence in order to establish a truly internal market and to prevent regulatory arbitrage within the EU. Agreeing at EU level on a single rule book for all 28 Member States is a big step. However, ensuring that this single rule book is supervised consistently across the 28 Member States is an even bigger step. Thirdly, in order to prevent crises we need commitment to the lessons learned from the crisis regarding risk analysis and the availability of high quality data on financial markets. We need more information on securities markets. Since the beginning of the financial crisis securities regulators have learned a lot about how to deal with financial stability – an area that was beforehand mainly reserved for central bankers and banking regulators. Information on financial markets is key to achieve the financial stability objective. It is therefore no surprise that many pieces of recently introduced legislation already include data requirements. Securities regulators however also need to step up their role on this and need more resources to collect and analyse data. It goes without saying that more data and analysis will also support our other important objective of investor protection."

The purpose of this document is to promote common supervisory approaches and practices in the application of MAR and its implementing measures. It does this by providing responses to questions posed by the general public and competent authorities in relation to the practical application of the MAR framework

The content of this document is aimed at competent authorities to ensure that in their supervisory activities and their actions are converging along the lines of the responses adopted by ESMA and at helping issuers, investors and other market participants by providing clarity on the content of the market abuse rules, rather than creating an extra layer of requirements.

Steven Maijoor keynote at the European Financial Forum in Dublin