MiFID II Simplified For You: How EU better protects Retail Investors

In this post, I’ll clarify MiFID (II) or Market in Financial Instruments Directive and Regulation (so not MiFID (II) Directive). I’ll answer the following questions:

• What is MiFID II?
• Why was MiFID II created?
• Who is MiFID II for?
• What impact does MiFID II have on (retail) investors?

MiFID or Market in Financial Instruments Directive explained in the simplest way: it is a set of rules written by the EU to help the banks’ customers, like you and me. It helps you better understand what you are investing in, how much these investments cost, and receive unbiased information about said investments in all of Europe.

The first version of MiFID implemented new measures, such as pre- and post-trade transparency requirements, and created rules of conduct for the EU’s financial firms. The first version of MiFID was primarily focused on ‘Over The Counter (OTC)‘ transactions.

You might think that MiFID was created after the 2008 financial crisis, but it actually came into effect prior to that. The EU did make changes in light of the crisis.

The issue of oversight and other issues found after the implementation were addressed with the introduction of MiFID II (2014/65/EU). This second version MiFID 2 got implemented at beginning of January 2018.

The first idea of a new version MiFID II started in 2014 by the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. They agreed on a revision and a more extensive version of MiFID following the financial crisis.

By improving and widening the scope of the existing version, they wanted to create a more efficient and resilient European financial market and level the playing field within it. To give you an idea of how much has been added, the original MiFID has 73 articles vs. 97 for MiFID II. In addition, much of the trade reporting requirements were published in a separate document called, Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR). It has another 55 articles of its own.

As referenced above, besides MiFID 2, the trade reporting regulations got improved as well with the introduction of the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR).

While MiFIR was technically passed as its own regulation it works in combination with MiFID II to extend the codes of conduct beyond shares. It covers other types of assets such as contract-based assets and more advanced things like structured finance products.
This is due to much of MiFIR’s content being an updated version of reporting rules that existed in the original 2004 MiFID document.

You might have understood from reading the above that MiFID’s main focus is not the retail investor, but it does have an impact on us indirectly. The indirect impact MiFID 2 has on retail investors is:

Bankers and brokers now have to send you an annual detailed cost overview of the investments you had in your portfolio during the last calendar year.
You do not even have to be an active investor to receive this overview. The cost report is drawn up as soon as you had at least one MiFID investment product in the course of the previous calendar year. MiFID products include shares, bonds, investment funds, structured products, and derivatives.

Although the general principles of reporting are clear, like always, certain points in the MiFID II law leave room for interpretation:

• Representation of the impact of the costs on the return. It needs to be mentioned but it’s not stated how it needs to shown to the client.
• Included products in the cost overview. As indicated above, you have at least the MiFID products, but it’s possible for some financial companies to go further since it is not prohibited to extend the reporting with non-MiFID products.
• The reporting of the taxes. It is a fact that transaction taxes, such as stock exchange taxes, must be reported. This tax is explicitly mentioned in the MiFID II regulations. Other (local) taxes are not clearly defined.

A second important impact a retail investor will see is their bank needing more personal information. It required for example the national registration/insurance number.

It’s clearly the goal of this “big data” push is to allow law makers to closely monitor trading activity within the EU. It also allows them to identify individual traders and prosecute them more easily when market abuse is discovered.

I hope you now understand what MiFID II/MiFIR means and how it has a varying but nonetheless major impact on every financial company within the EU.

MiFID II is just one of the new rules the EU created and that impacts all the financial companies operating in Europe.
Together with other new proposed rules like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU looks to create more transparency, rights, and protection for its EU citizens.

Just like national governments continuously tweak their laws, so is MiFID II an improvement on the first version. Some of these tweaks, like the appointment of a single officer responsible for protecting client interests from within the firm, are now explicit requirements for companies wanting to do business in the European market.

Sources:

• deutsche-boerse.com
• https://www.ft.com
• MiFID I directive
• MiFID II directive
• MiFIR regulation