On 19 November 2020 the European Commission published its Work Programme for 2021. The Work Programme, titled ‘A Union of vitality in a world of fragility’, is the second one published by the Von der Leyen Commission. The Work Programme provides an overview of the legislative priorities of the Commission for the upcoming year, as well as a timeline on when legislative initiatives are intended to be published. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the…

Financial institutions have had to deal with two challenges in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first challenge is financial – how to address and mitigate the sharp drop in the value of financial assets or loss of liquidity. The second challenge is operational – how to address the risk of failure of resources and have clear, robust and dynamic plans in place to deliver consistent services to customers and other stakeholders. Over the…

On 19 October 2020, HM Treasury issued phase II of its consultation on the financial services future regulatory framework review. Phase I of the review looked at coordination between the UK authorities that have responsibility for the regulation of, and policy for, the financial services sector. HM Government published its response on 11 March 2020, announcing that it and the UK financial services regulators were creating a Financial Services Regulatory Initiatives Grid to help firms…

The recording from the October 40 Minute Briefing, Learning lessons: Proactive governance in the autumn, is now available here. In the October edition of the webinar we focussed on “lessons learned” reviews, examining how such reviews can be successfully conducted so that they are valuable exercises. The webinar also considered skilled persons reviews, focussing in particular on the common pitfalls into which businesses may fall.…

On 19 October 2020, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) issued a consultation paper regarding the technical standards on conditions which require an extension of authorisation for a central counterparty (CCP), conditions which require validations of a CCP’s changes to models and parameters by a Member State competent authority (NCA) and ESMA and the procedure for consulting the college on whether or not those conditions are met. The legislative background to the consultation paper…

On 19 October 2020, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a toolkit of effective practices for financial institutions’ cyber incident response and recovery (CIRR). The toolkit draws on the feedback from a public consultation process, including four virtual outreach meetings. The report was delivered to G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors for their October meeting. The toolkit includes 49 practices for effective CIRR across seven components: (i) governance, (ii) planning and preparation, (iii) analysis,…

On 19 October 2020, the European Commission launched a public consultation on EU rules for long-term investment funds. European long-term investment funds (ELTIFs) is an EU scheme to facilitate investment – through alternative investment funds – in longer-term assets such as transport and social infrastructure projects (energy, hospitals, social housing), property and small firms. The overall objective of the consultation is to evaluate the effectiveness of the ELTIF framework and identify the reasons for the…