Stakeholder Relations
How is stakeholder interaction useful to ESMA?
ESMA is committed to open dialogue and co-operation with all its stakeholders to ensure development of evidence-based regulation and policy, but also to foster public understanding, confidence, and acceptance of ESMA’s decisions. As an open and transparent EU Authority, and in order to successfully achieve its mission, ESMA welcomes and encourages interaction with stakeholders.
Principles guiding ESMA interaction with stakeholders
ESMA’s stakeholder management is driven by the strategic objectives of investor protection, orderly markets, and financial stability. To ensure the delivery of these objectives is properly reflected in all stakeholder-related interactions, ESMA intends to take its engagement decisions based on the following principles:
▸ Efficiency and prioritisation: ESMA uses its limited resources in the most economical way and therefore seeks to maximise efficiency in its external engagement. ESMA’s senior management and staff respond to stakeholders’ meeting requests or speaking appearances according to the priorities set out in ESMA strategy 2023-2028.
▸ Balanced interaction: ESMA seeks balanced representation of interests and prioritises interactions with most added value in terms of delivering on topics in the respective annual work programme. ESMA engages proactively with stakeholders, whose organisational set-up and resources may not allow them to access ESMA (e.g. retail investors) and also ensures balanced geographical coverage by reaching out to local stakeholders, when possible.
▸ Transparency and accessibility: For economic, environmental, and practical reasons as well as to improve equality of access, ESMA maximises the use digital tools and virtual meetings in the context of its consultations as well as informing the public about its work. ESMA remains transparent by publishing its forward looking calendar as well as planned consultations. ESMA’s meetings with stakeholders are published on its website on a quarterly basis. The calendars of ESMA’s Chair and Executive director and CCP Supervisory Committee are published separately.
How do we interact with stakeholders?
Formal groups:
- Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group (SMSG) established by ESMA’s founding regulation.
- Consultative Working Groups used by ESMA’s standing committees and focussed on particular policy areas.
Targeted stakeholder outreach:
- Bilateral / multilateral meetings between ESMA and one or several stakeholders.
- Open hearings and webinars allowing all interested stakeholders to raise their comments on a specific policy area.
- Roundtable workshops where participants meet and talk in conditions of equality with a view of mutual learning.
- Speaking appearances at events and conferences organised in Europe and beyond.
Staying up to date and contacting ESMA
- ESMA has a general email address: info@esma.europa.eu, where queries regarding ESMA’s work can be sent.
- To submit a request for an ESMA speaker, please use the form available on our website. We encourage stakeholders to send consolidated requests for speaking appearances, when inviting multiple ESMA speakers for the same event.
- To ensure that interested parties are informed about key publications, the ESMA website provides a subscription service. We also make available an RSS feed, and can be followed on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Publication of ESMA meetings with external stakeholders
ESMA is committed to the Treaty principles of openness and transparency. With the purpose of informing the general public about the external stakeholders met in the course of ESMA’s policy-making activities, an overview of meetings held at staff level is regularly, at least three times per year, made available on ESMA’s website under “ESMA Staff Stakeholder contacts”.
Stakeholders’ meetings with ESMA Senior Management are published more frequently. The ESMA Chair applies the ESMA Regulation and makes the meetings with external stakeholders' public within a period of two weeks (this period does not include public holidays). The Executive Director, CCP Supervisory Committee Chair and the Independent Members apply the principle of transparency in a proportionate manner. The meetings held at Senior Management level are published separately here and here.
This practice does not apply to the members of the Board of Supervisors or the Management Board, nor to the National Competent Authorities’ representatives in ESMA Groups.
Information for external stakeholders meeting with ESMA staff
When external stakeholders attend a meeting with ESMA staff, the date, the name of the entity and topics discussed during the meeting will be made public on ESMA’s website.
General principles
External stakeholders for the purposes of the publication of meetings include any organisation or self-employed individual having the objective of directly or indirectly influencing the formulation or implementation of ESMA policymaking. Applicable exceptions are specified below.
The scope of the publication of ESMA staff meetings is aligned with the Commission Decision 2014/838/EU on the publication of information on meetings held between Directors-Generals and organisations or self-employed individuals.
Exceptions to publication of ESMA staff meetings
Meetings that are indispensable for ESMA’s work (e.g. SMSG, CWGs, meetings arising in the context of ESMA supervisory mandates or ongoing media interactions) and those recurrent in nature (e.g. meetings arising due to ESMA’s membership in international organisations/bodies) are exempted from the staff publication obligation for proportionality reasons. Encounters of a purely private, social and/or spontaneous character are also excluded, in line with the European Commission Decision 2014/838/EU. Exempted are also any engagements, which do not require active participation or do not have targeted audience i.e. are not intended to influence ESMA’s work.
The following meetings will not be publicly disclosed:
- Meetings with EU institutions or bodies
- Meetings with international organisations
- Meetings with national, regional, and local authorities of EU Member States
- Meetings with third-country national, regional, and local authorities
- Meetings arising in the context of ESMA supervisory mandates when the subject matter of the meeting is direct supervision and related actions
- Meetings of ESMA Groups (including peer review committees)
- Meetings with the members of the Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group or Consultative Working Groups when the subject matter of the meeting is related to the work of the respective Group
- Meetings with whistle-blowers and stakeholders in need of protection, e.g., when sharing confidential information with ESMA staff on irregularities
- Public meetings/hearings organised by ESMA and announced accordingly on ESMA’s website
- Social events in context of a meeting recorded in the list of ESMA staff meetings with external stakeholders
- Social meetings required by social courtesy or diplomatic usage
- Encounters of a purely private or social character or spontaneous encounters
- Meetings with media representatives
- External speaking events with a wide audience (i.e. not targeted audience) that are announced accordingly on ESMA’s website
- Attendance to an event without active participation
- Spontaneous phone calls (unless pre-arranged audio/video)
If several topics are part of the meeting agenda (e.g. items covering policy-making but also supervision and/or sharing of confidential information) the meeting information shall be published only in regard to the policy-making part of the meeting, unless such an entry would risk revealing confidential or sensitive information.
Data protection
When external stakeholders attend a meeting with ESMA staff, the date, respective stakeholder (i.e. name of the entity) be made public on ESMA’s website. Where the external stakeholder concerned is a self-employed individual this may entail making public personal data (i.e., name, surname of the individual). Any personal data processed in the context of external stakeholder engagement shall be handled in compliance with the requirements laid down in Regulation (EU) 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 and Decision No 1247/2002/EC.
Further information regarding the processing of your personal data can be found here.
Furthermore, ESMA is subject to Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 regarding public access to documents according to which documents, or parts of them, in ESMA’s possession may be made public following a request to share such information. Such requests may also entail requests to disclose the names of the persons in attendance.