EFAMA has today published its European Quarterly Statistical Release for Q2 of 2024.
EFAMA has today published its European Quarterly Statistical Release for Q2 of 2024.
EFAMA identifies four key areas for improvement
EFAMA welcomes the high degree of ambition and clear call to urgent action put forward by former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi to address the EU's competitiveness challenges and reverse the ongoing trend of slowing growth and declining productivity. Improving the EU’s global competitiveness is vital for preserving EU’s prosperity in the long run, enhancing investment opportunities and attracting more capital into the EU.
EFAMA has published its latest Monthly Statistical Release for June 2024.
Thomas Tilley, Senior Economist at EFAMA, commented: “The ECB rate cut of early June resulted in strong net inflows into bond UCITS throughout the month.”
The main developments in June can be summarised as follows:
62,000+ new fund share classes have been added, including new categories
ESMA technical standards move one step closer to consolidated tape launch.
ESMA recently closed the consultation for regulatory technical standards that will define the competitive selection process for the consolidated tape, as well as the technical abilities that applicants will be assessed on. In its response for the buy-side, EFAMA stressed that a robust governance framework for the operators of the tapes is critical.
EFAMA supports achieving greater transparency through reform of the bond deferral regime. We would like to offer some feedback that suggests a different calibration on both liquidity thresholds, and the determination of trade size buckets.
We appreciate the analysis carried out by ESMA, which offers a solid basis for the review of the bond deferral regime. Nevertheless, we would like to provide some feedback on the proposed approach, which we believe can be further finetuned:
ESMA’s Call for Evidence on the UCITS Eligible Assets Directive is a welcome opportunity to take stock of the existing UCITS framework.
FIA, ISDA, AFME, ICI, AIMA, EBF and EFAMA (together the Associations) welcome the
European Commission's (the Commission) timely and temporary equivalence decision from
21 September 2020 with respect to UK central counterparties (CCPs) and subsequent
recognition decisions by ESMA of CCPs and the recent temporary equivalence decision for
UK Central Securities Depositories (CSDs) under CSDR. Together, these steps have provided
much needed certainty for continued and uninterrupted access to these CCPs and CSDs by
EFAMA has some concerns with ESMA’s clarifications. In the consultation paper (CP), ESMA seems to have a very broad interpretation of the ‘multilateral systems’ definition under MiFID II and states that ‘systems where trading interests can interact but where the execution of transactions is formally undertaken outside the system still qualify as a multilateral system and should be required to seek authorisation’ (paragraph 36).
We disagree with an extension of its scope to UCITS’ and AIFs’ management companies to the scope of the reporting requirements imposed by MiFIR, Art. 26. This extension would be in breach of the principle of proportionality, as:
Article 51(5) of the BMR provides that, unless the Commission has adopted an equivalence decision in relation to a particular third country, a third country administrator has been recognised or a third country benchmark has been endorsed, EU supervised entities may only use a third country benchmark in financial instruments, financial contracts and measurements of the performance of an investment fund that already reference the relevant benchmark prior to 31 December 2021.
EFAMA is grateful for the opportunity to comment on some messages included in the aforementioned roadmap. We believe that these comments should be made clear for all persons interested, especially to those who would like to participate in the upcoming public consultation.
Asset managers represent an important group of benchmark users, either in the case of index funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) - where benchmarks are used as a target for index tracking funds - or in the case of the evaluation of an active manager’s performance - where the fund performance is measured against a selected index or a set of indices.

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