Financial, MiFID II, New Intermediaries Regulation, Investment Companies, Requirements for knowledge and skills of Intermediaries staff, Application Guidelines, 05/10/2018, Consob
Article 25 (1) of Directive 2014/65 / EU (MiFID II)
Safeguarding the competitive position of Italian industry and the objective of investor protection.
On 17 December 2015, ESMA published the Guidelines for the assessment of knowledge and competence (“Guidelines”), as required by Article 25 (1) of Directive 2014/65 / EU (MiFID II), in order to to further detail the obligation for investment firms to ensure that their employees, who provide information or advice to customers on investment in financial instruments, have adequate knowledge and skills.
The aforementioned Guidelines are aimed at encouraging convergence in the implementation of Article 25 of MiFID II, although they do not have full binding force because they are based on a comply or explain mechanism by national supervisors.
Furthermore, they have been formulated in such a way as to leave sufficient space for autonomy to the authorities, in their implementation, in order to take account of national peculiarities.
In order to comply with the Guidelines, Consob carried out a preliminary consultation – launched on 22 December 2016 and concluded on 20 January 2017 – as well as a second consultation – which took place from 6 July to 21 August 2017 – simultaneously with the redefinition of the entire secondary discipline issued in connection with EU regulations dictated by MiFID II and by regulation (EU) no. 600/2014.
On February 15th 2018 the Consob resolution no. 20307 (new Intermediaries Regulation), following the acquisition of the prescribed agreement and the opinions of the Bank of Italy on specific disciplinary areas, including the requirements of knowledge and competence.
With this resolution the aforementioned requirements have been included in the corpus of the provisions applicable to intermediaries in the performance of their activities.
The final drafting of the dispositions of the species took into account the observations made by the stakeholders during the consultations, which revealed a widespread need for specific indications on how to apply a newly introduced discipline at the time of the second MiFID directive.
Following further clarification requests received from Consob following the adoption of the new Intermediaries Regulation, the required application guidelines are provided below, through the form of answers to the questions put forward.
After fulfilling the need to accompany, during the first application, to the implementation of the procedures required for staff knowledge and skills, Consob intends to proceed, by 2019, to the verification of the discipline in question, with a view to enhance the decision-making autonomy of the qualified subjects and safeguard the competitive position of the Italian industry, without prejudice to the objective of investor protection.
This exercise will benefit from the first supervisory findings, an appropriate comparative analysis of the second level discipline dictated in other EU countries, as well as the outcomes of a public consultation phase.
05/10/2018
Source Consob
