MiFID II delay - a missed opportunity

The European Commission’s long-awaited official proposal for a one year extension to the MiFID II deadline is finally published today. In short, application dates will be pushed back by one year, with the official go-live date now set for Wednesday 3rd January 2018.

While the delay comes as a massive relief to many market participants and the regulators, it is also a missed opportunity. Brussels opted, again, to define a fixed deadline rather than a relative timeline (12 months after an event, for example). The recitals for the amending directive and regulation contain some far from subtle hints to ESMA’s advice that the new deadline assumes the transpositions and the relevant technical standards are delivered by mid-2016. What if that does not happen? Let’s just hope we don’t have to find out.