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Robert Orphele, chairman of the Autorite des Marches Financiers
(AMF), said EU market access rules for non-EU or "third
countries" should be revamped before the bloc's financial market
is opened up to Britain, which is quitting the EU next March.
"When the main financial center of the EU is about to leave the
Union, it is clear that the European third country regimes as
previously defined can no longer be appropriate and hence
deserve to be revisited," Orphele told a meeting of the OMFIF
think tank.
Currently, foreign firms can serve EU customers if their home
rules are "equivalent" or as strict as the bloc's. This allows
EU regulators to "defer" to a firm's home supervisor, meaning
not every EU rule has to be complied with.
He singled out the EU's sweeping MiFID II securities rules that
were introduced in January, saying they should be more
comprehensively applied to foreign firms to ensure consumer
protection and financial stability.
"In my opinion, this can only be ensured by mandating that a
subset of MiFID II... on transaction reporting, transparency,
mandatory trading of shares and derivatives on platforms, is
applied to third country firms operating in the EU," Orphele
said.
This is not extra-territoriality or regulatory overreach, he
said. "This is ensuring a proper level playing field in Europe,
when European clients are involved."
Orphele said the EU should grant "transitory" equivalence to
market infrastructure - such as for trading and clearing
securities - to allow the bloc to make the changes to its
equivalence regime as he set out in his speech.
(Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
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