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ESMA’s Executive Director, Verena Ross, says in her foreword to the Annual Report: ”2013 was somewhat of a turning point for ESMA in terms of moving from its traditional policy role to a more implementation- and supervision-orientated role, with direct supervisory responsibility for an expanded set of financial market entities and many on-going tasks related to implementation, supervisory convergence and data monitoring and analysis. It was thus an important year in ESMA’s further development as an organisation. Bringing OTC derivatives trading under regulatory oversight, by requiring trade reporting, central clearing and risk mitigation, is an important change that will make derivatives markets a safer place.
Besides much standard-setting that ESMA had to accomplish under EMIR, changing the way derivatives trading works also meant for ESMA a strengthening of its role as a pan-European supervisor by taking on the supervision of six newly authorised EU-based trade repositories.
ESMA furthermore played a key role together with NCAs in starting to prepare the supervisory colleges that will authorise and supervise European clearing houses. Finally, EMIR also meant more international engagement for ESMA in terms of active discussions with our counterparties in other key derivative markets jurisdictions and with international standards setters such as IOSCO and the FSB. It is clear that MiFID II will lead to some similar developments that will require ESMA to ensure that its organisational set up is able to cope not only with the initial rule-making but also the on-going implementation challenges.”