On October 1, 2018, ESMA published its Annual Work Programme for 2019, dated September 26, 2018. ESMA sets out its focus areas for 2019 and provides details of expected outputs within each of the areas. ESMA also indicates that a number of pieces of EU legislation may be reviewed. These include the Market Abuse Regulation and the clearing obligation under the European Market Infrastructure Regulation, in addition to the reviews that have already been announced.
The focus priorities, which cover the various sectors for which ESMA is responsible, are:
- Supervisory convergence through the
adoption of guidelines, Q&As and opinions
ESMA intends to focus on ensuring the consistent application of MiFID II and will continue to issue opinions on position limits, waivers for equity and non-equity instruments and on the temporary suspension from pre- and post-trade transparency requirements. ESMA will also be conducting assessments of third-country trading venues in the context of transparency and position limits.
In addition, work will be done to increase supervisory convergence under the new Prospectus Regulation, which will apply directly across the EU from July 21, 2019, and the Securitization Regulation, which will apply directly across the EU to securities issued under securitizations on or after January 1, 2019. In the funds sector, ESMA will develop guidelines on liquidity stress testing by investment fund managers and, under the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive, on leverage limits. For the post -trade services, ESMA will develop guidelines to assist in implementation of the settlement discipline regime under the Central Securities Depositories Regulation. - Assessing risks to investors, markets
and financial stability
ESMA will be using the increasing amount of data that it holds to monitor for risks within the financial markets and to provide in-depth analytical research. - Completing a single rulebook for EU
financial markets
In 2019, ESMA will continue to contribute to the implementation of the Capital Markets Union and FinTech Action Plans by, amongst other things, delivering technical advice, draft technical standards and opinions under a number of EU pieces of legislation. These will include, for example, technical advice on the content of exempted documents under the Prospectus Regulation and technical standards under both the revised European Social Entrepreneurship Funds Regulation and the European Long-Term Investment Funds Regulation. In addition, ESMA will be assisting the European Commission prepare its various reports on the impact of the MiFID II package.
Furthermore, ESMA will be issuing advice to national regulators on the recognition of third-country administrators under the EU Benchmarks Regulation. ESMA has indicated that it will support the work on equivalence assessments of third-country regimes in various sectors. - Directly supervising certain
entities, such as credit rating agencies and trade
repositories.
ESMA will continue to supervise the entities that currently fall under its direct supervision and it will assume supervisory responsibility for trade repositories reporting under the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation as well as securitization repositories.
ESMA's Annual Work Programme for 2019 is available at: https://www.esma.europa.eu/sites/default/files/library/esma20-95-933_2019_annual_work_programme.pdf.
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