On February 27, the European Commission extended for four months the deadline for ESMA advise on the equivalence between non-EU legal and supervisory frameworks and EMIR, the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation.  According to the letter from the Commission, ESMA shall now deliver its advice on Japan and the USA by 15 June 2013 and, for the remaining countries specified in the request by 15 July 2013.  The original deadline was 15 March 2013.

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

Letter regarding Technical advice on possible delegated acts concerning procedural rules to impose fines and periodic penalty payments to Trade Repositories (TRs)

European Commission response to ESMA's letter to Michel Barnier, Commissioner for Internal Market and Services regarding the classificiation of financial instruments as derivatives sent on 14 February. ESMA Letter 2014/184

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."

This letter to the European Commission advances ESMA's intention to ease certain frontloading requirement under the European Markets Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR).  Frontloading is a term that refers to the clearing obligation under EMIR, which will oblige counterparties to centrally clear certain derivative trades through clearing houses (CCP). ESMA believes that the frontloading procedure creates uncertainties for derivatives end-users while the exact terms of the clearing obligation has not been defined which could have adverse impacts on risk hedging and financial stability. Therefore, ESMA informs the European Commission that it intends to establish the frontloading requirement in a manner that will minimise uncertainty. The clearing requirement began to apply with the first authorisation of an EU-based CCP which happened on 18 March 2014. Following the first CCP approval, EMIR requires ESMA to draft within six months technical standards which will define the derivatives classes subject to central clearing.  However, compulsory central clearing will only start with the entry-into-force of the technical standards which creates the need to ‘frontload’ those derivate trades since 18 March 2014.

The European Commission has written to ESMA regarding the definition of a financial instrument relating to foreign currency (FX contract).