The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its 2017 Work Programme which sets out its priorities and areas of focus for 2017 in support of its mission to enhance investor protection and promote stable and orderly financial markets.

The programme reflects the shift in focus of ESMA’s work, from building the single rulebook, towards ensuring its consistent application across the European Union (EU), as outlined in its 2016-2020 Strategic Orientation. The key areas of focus under ESMA’s activities of supervisory convergence, assessing risks, single rulebook and direct supervision will be:

• Converging supervisory practices on the implementation of MiFIDII/MiFIR ;
• Focusing on data quality;
• Level 2 work on the Benchmarks Regulation and on various initiatives under the umbrella of the Capital Markets Union; and
• Directly supervising credit rating agencies (CRA) and trade repositories (TR), with a particular focus on their ancillary activities given the trend of combining ancillary and core services.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has issued today a consultation paper on draft technical standards implementing the Securities Financing Transaction Regulation (SFTR), which aims to increase the transparency of shadow banking activities. Securities financing transactions (SFTs) are transactions where securities are used to borrow cash (or other higher investment-grade securities), or vice versa – this includes repurchase transactions, securities lending and sell/buy-back transactions.