What is MiFID II? | MiFID Compliance (2024)

The challenge of MiFID compliance

The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II is a revision of a legislative framework created by the European Union (EU) in 2007 to regulate financial markets and provide greater protection for investors. Updated in 2018, the new rules impose more reporting requirements and tests in order to increase transparency, requiring trading organizations to prove they have acted honestly, fairly, professionally and in the best interests of their clients at all times. MiFID compliance requires firms to capture all communications surrounding transactions, including email, telephone calls, social media and in-person meetings.

To ensure MiFID compliance, firms must monitor and store communications for up to seven years, creating a new level of compliance headache andrecords retentioncomplexity for many financial organizations. As the volume of email data within financial service organizations continues to expand exponentially, MiFID compliance – along with other regulatory requirements likeDodd-Frank complianceandFINRA worm compliance– becomes increasingly difficult to manage. To achieve MiFID compliance while minimizing the burden of managing email retention, more financial services organizations everywhere are turning to Mimecast.

What is MiFID II? | MiFID Compliance (1)

Simplifying MiFID compliance with Mimecast

Mimecast is a cloud-based email security and compliance platform that enables organizations to improve cyber resilience. Serving more than 40,000 customers globally, Mimecast provides solutions for email security, archiving, continuity and awareness training.

The Mimecast Cloud Archive is a modern, multi-purpose business enablement platform that provides immutable archives, robust supervisory features and compliance-driven chains of custody to help manageemail HIPAA compliance, FINRA compliance andFIPS compliancealong with MiFID compliance. By aggregating data across multiple platforms to create a single, secure cloud archive, Mimecast helps IT teams streamline management and reduce overhead while meeting MiFID compliance requirements and responding to compliance inquiries quickly and accurately.

Mimecast's cloud archive provides:

  • Comprehensive compliance, e-discovery and litigation support including legal hold, retention, case management and data export.
  • Self-service controls for compliance teams that relieve IT from needing to help with every compliance request.
  • Data immutability by default and detailed activity logging.
  • Search results guaranteed in seconds for early insight into MiFID compliance status.
  • Fast and effective case review with automated culling to significantly reduce third-party costs.

Mimecast's compliance solutions integrate seamlessly with Mimecast security and targeted threat protection, enabling organizations to protect email data with powerful defenses. Mimecast's Microsoft Exchange andOffice 365 threat intelligenceprovides up-to-the-minute insight into the latest threats to data within the most widely-used email platforms.

Modernize MiFID compliance workflows with Mimecast Supervision

To demonstrate MiFID compliance, supervision review personnel at financial firms must manage and review large amounts of data, searching for any evidence of potential malfeasance and flagging risk-laden content for further review. With vast amounts of content to review, it's easy for bottlenecks to slow this unwieldy process, reducing reviewer productivity and threatening timely MiFID compliance.

Mimecast Supervision is a solution that can be easily integrated with Mimecast Cloud Archive to enable compliance personnel to systematically review and discover targeted data within the enormous amount of communications subject to MiFID regulations. With Mimecast Supervision, reviewers can use an auditable and managed supervision review process to ensure productivity while managing MiFID compliance requirements.

Mimecast Supervision provides:

  • Targeted detection rules to reduce false positives in sampling data and to focus on specific senders/recipients.
  • Highlighting and filtering by end-user to accelerate the review process.
  • Reporting on reviewer productivity to help identify bottlenecks in the compliance review process.
  • Customizable workflow and multi-tier escalation.

FAQs: What is MiFID II?

What is MiFID II?

MiFID II is the Markets and Financial Instruments Directive II, an update to the original MiFID regulations launched in 2007 to help manage and transform Europe's financial industry. The updated regulations, which came into effect on January 3, 2018, are intended to offer greater protection to investors and to bring more transparency to all asset classes.

What will MiFID compliance require?

Complying with MiFID II requires firms to prove they have acted honestly and fairly in all trades and that they have put their client's best interests ahead of their own profit priorities and incentives. To prove their compliance, firms must retain all communications leading up to a transaction for a period of seven years.

Are firms outside the EU affected by MiFID compliance requirements?

Financial firms outside the EU may be impacted by MiFID II requirements and required to demonstrate MiFID compliance if they perform sub-advising for an EU fund manager, have an EU subadvisor, trade in EU securities on an EU regulated market or have an EU affiliate.

What is MiFID II? | MiFID Compliance (2024)

FAQs

What is MiFID II? | MiFID Compliance? ›

The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II is a revision of a legislative framework created by the European Union (EU) in 2007 to regulate financial markets and provide greater protection for investors.

What is MiFID II in simple terms? ›

MiFID II regulates off-exchange and over-the-counter trading, essentially pushing it onto official exchanges. Increasing transparency for trading costs and improving record keeping for transactions are among the key aims of the regulations.

What is MiFID 2 time compliance? ›

MiFID II requires every server that is an active market participant to have a maximum divergence of between 100 microseconds or 1 millisecond from the benchmark of UTC.

What is MiFID II best execution summary? ›

Obligation to execute orders on terms most favourable to the client. A firm must take all sufficient steps to obtain, when executing orders, the best possible results for its clients taking into account the execution factors.

What are the key pillars of MiFID II? ›

And, because of that, it is effectively creating a new framework for regulation based on three principle pillars: Best execution, information to clients, and surveillance. Limits, monitoring and controls. Regulatory reporting and Transparency.

What is MiFID II compliance? ›

Complying with MiFID II requires firms to prove they have acted honestly and fairly in all trades and that they have put their client's best interests ahead of their own profit priorities and incentives.

What are the key points of MiFID 2? ›

MiFID II contains new requirements for algorithmic trading (any trading where a computer algorithm automatically determines aspects of an order) that require firms to have assistance to ensure that erroneous orders can be prevented from creating disorderly markets.

Does MiFID 2 apply to us? ›

One of its declared aims was to give investors transparency into the cost of research and trading commissions, by forcing an unbundling of payments for these services. The MiFID II process, under which research is invoiced and paid for separately, removes the exclusion from being regulated as a U.S. broker-dealer.

What are the reporting requirements for MiFID 2? ›

Under MiFID II, each and every client (fund, account or natural person) will have to be identified in a standardised format. For funds and managed accounts this must be a valid Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) code.

What is the penalty for MiFID II non compliance? ›

This means that 40 percent of firms are at risk of non-compliance with article 16 of MiFID II, which could result in fines of up to €5 million, or 10 percent of a firm's annual turnover.

What is the objective of MiFID II? ›

The overall goal of MiFID II/R is to improve transparency, investor protection, and the integrity of financial markets within the EU.

What is the goal of MiFID? ›

The goal of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) is to increase transparency across EU financial markets and to standardize regulatory disclosures for firms. MiFID is part of the regulatory changes sweeping the EU that impact all financial firms' compliance departments.

Who is impacted by MiFID II? ›

MiFID II prioritizes investor protection and fosters market transparency, bringing nearly all assets and professions within the EU financial services industry under its umbrella. Consequently, investment firms, wealth managers, and other market participants face strict rules regarding trading.

What is MiFID II for dummies? ›

MiFID II requires that financial firms assess the suitability and appropriateness of financial products to their customers. This includes assessing if a client has the ability to bear the losses incurred from a product and their tolerance of the risk involved.

What is MiFID in simple terms? ›

The original Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID I) was introduced on 1 November 2007 to set out European Union (EU) regulation in respect of securities and financial markets.

What are the rules of MiFID 2? ›

The MiFID II reform means that organised trading of financial instruments must shift to multilateral and regulated trading platforms or be subject to transparency requirements where traded over-the-counter (OTC).

Does MiFID II apply to us? ›

The scope of MiFID II's territorial reach means that it will only apply directly to U.K. and EU-regulated investment firms.

What is the difference between MiFID and MiFID II? ›

First proposed in 2012, the revised directive was intended to restore confidence in the markets following the 2008 market crash. While MiFID was limited to equity stocks, MiFID II extended the requirements to issuers of all types of securities, including debt securities, derivatives, and structured instruments.

What is an example of a MiFID business? ›

A MiFID firm is one that is: An investment firm with its head office in the UK; or. A CRD credit firm providing investment services; or. A collective portfolio management investment firm.

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