ESMA Board Member: Capital Market Union Shouldn't 'Reinvent the Wheel'

Speaking at the European Buy-Side Technology Summit 2015, Konstantinos Botopoulos, MISC committee chairman and member of the management board of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), stated that one of the main goals of creating a Capital Market Union (CMU) was the creation of a harmonized environment for regulations.

"The idea behind the CMU is not to reinvent the wheel by creating new rules but to achieve free flow of capital by using the existing tools and finding intelligent ways to tie everything together," he says.

Further Centralization

With billions of reports a week from the 3000 trade repositories across the EU, data is definitely one of the main issues stemming out of EMIR, and more is to come with the MiFID reporting requirements.

Botopoulos explained that ESMA is very well aware of the burden of the problem and regulatory fatigue, which is why they are focusing on reducing the duplication of reporting by creating a central hub to gather reporting data directly from the national authorities.

"We are in the process of building a central data unit in Esma for the assessment of the whole of trade data," he said. "We are conscious of the burden of the problem and that is why we are concentrating on the idea of centrally gathering the data. One stream of reporting goes to TR, another one is instrument related data, which is MiFID related data, and we want to be able to combine those data sets so we can identify the discrepancies and avoid the replication of reporting."

Political Concerns

There are still a lot of challenges ahead, especially political challenges highlighted by the possible of a British exit from the union.

The important thing for regulators, therefore, is to preserve recent achievements, such as the protection layer securing investors with the creation of the single market.

"Will Europe find a way to harmonize its territory? What will the role of the UK be going forward? Those are still very much in their air but we will eventually get there," said Botopoulos.