Under MiFID II, investment advice is defined as a personal recommendation to a client in relation to transactions in financial instruments. In practice, the personal recommendation, the suitability assessment, the documentation and the technical generation/transmission of the suitability statement may be performed by different persons and/or partly automated systems.

Could ESMA clarify the following points:

1. For determining whether and by whom investment advice was provided, is it primarily relevant who gave/communicated the personal recommendation to the client, rather than who merely prepared/generated/transmitted the suitability statement through IT systems?

2. Should the suitability statement under MiFID II / Delegated Regulation (EU) 2017/565 be understood as documentation and rationale of a recommendation that has already been made, rather than as a constitutive element of “investment advice”?

3. Is it necessary, for the attribution of investment advice to a specific staff member, that the same staff member is technically able to create/approve/transmit the suitability statement, or can these steps be separated without changing the attribution of who “advised”?