Is MiFID II still fit for purpose in a post-COVID financial landscape?

By Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and co-founder at Content Guru

January 2^nd, 2021 was the third anniversary of the implementation of MiFID II, a legislative framework instituted by the European Union (EU) to regulate financial markets in the bloc and improve protections for investors. This second iteration of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive includes a range of binding obligations for financial traders, including the need to record and store any/all external communications that could result in a trade, for a minimum of five years.

MiFID II is a complex piece of legislation to put it mildly and compliance requires a great deal of time and effort. Despite this, its ‘real-world’ value currently remains subject to debate. While the EU Regulator recently stated that rules around investment research and analysis had been a success, it has previously conceded aspects of MiFID II targeting marketing data costs have been less so. In a wider sense, industry professionals affected by the new legislation have extremely mixed feelings about its benefits and detriments, both to their work as individuals and to the financial sector as a whole.

However, one thing that is clear is the imposition of financial penalties associated with non-compliance to MiFID II is likely to increase significantly in the near future. Under the original MiFID legislation, many high-profile organisations, including Goldman Sachs International, received fines running into tens of millions of pounds for failing to report transactions in an accurate and timely fashion. Conversely, less than €2 million in fines were handed out under MiFID II in the whole of 2019. Many industry commentators attribute this low figure to a grace period for the new legislation, with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) giving firms some wiggle room as they acclimatise to it. But as this period ends, fines and penalties are expected to skyrocket.

Applying pre-COVID legislation in a post-COVID landscape

Of course, to say the financial landscape has changed somewhat in the last twelve months is a bit of an understatement, which makes adherence to MiFID II even harder than it was previously. In particular, the massive shift to home working has rapidly accelerated the adoption of new innovations and technologies aimed at making remote collaboration more effective, but not necessarily MiFID II compliant.

Organisations with well-established processes and methodologies have been forced to rapidly rethink their strategies. In many cases, the speed at which they’ve been able to achieve this has been extremely impressive, but it’s come at the expense of compliance. After all, MiFID II is applicable to any communication that may result in a trade. In a lockdown environment, where finance professionals are collaborating and screen sharing to make decisions, they are still operating under the compliance rules set out and their interactions should be recorded and stored. But how many organisations have actually put processes in place to meet these obligations as part of the ‘new normal’?

As the rollout of multiple COVID vaccines gets underway around the world, there’s growing hope of a return to more traditional working environments in the not-too-distant future. But with the popularity of home working leading to many organisations saying it’ll become a permanent fixture, where does that leave MiFID II compliance?

A complex compliance challenge

For compliance officers looking to shore up their organisation’s post-COVID remote work environment against MiFID II breaches, there are numerous concerns. For example, how can they ensure every pertinent conversation across numerous digital platforms, being used by hundreds of traders, is correctly managed and recorded? The issue can be broken down into two main categories. The first is the management of tools and services in question, and the second is management of the data being shared across them.

Technical complexity requires a proactive, technology-led response. Disjointed, reactive compliance is becoming increasingly unfeasible, given the depth and breadth of tools now being used. For instance, if trading professionals use Microsoft Teams, but their client prefers Skype, how can compliance officers ensure that each and every recording is properly maintained, regardless of which platform is used each time? The answer may lie in unified solutions, which provide a central platform to take advantage of these best-of-breed technologies and provides resources such as search-and-replay, e-discovery and end-to-end trade reconstruction across a diverse technical ecosystem. Unified solutions may allow firms to develop cost effective, enterprise-wide compliance and data management policies that are fit for purpose in the post-COVID landscape.

Effective data management and analytics will play pivotal role

One thing becoming increasingly clear is that the ability to manage and analyse datasets in their entirety, rather than relying on random manual sampling, will play a pivotal role in eliminating dangerous reporting gaps. Today’s analytics solutions and advanced speech-to-text technologies have already proven invaluable over the last ten months of restrictions and will continue to set the benchmark going forward. Tools such as universal search not only give compliance officers the visibility they need to do their jobs properly, they also help maintain effective standards across all relevant stakeholders.

However, such solutions have requirements of their own, particularly when it comes to robust data and storage. Firms must ensure that their systems utilise compliant data storage, that has sufficient capacity to retain all types of electronic communications data, including uncompressed stereo voice recordings, for at least five years after they are recorded, as stipulated by MiFID II.

The ability to comply with legislation such as MiFID II remains a key priority for every business within its scope. However, adhering to pre-COVID legislation in a post-COVID landscape is a lot easier said than done for many. Whether the creation of MiFID III will ultimately be required remains to be seen. Until then, it’s clear that successful compliance will rely on the effective implementation of technology-led solutions capable of overcoming the new barriers created by such a fundamental shift in work practices over the last 12 months.