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Speaking at the Austrian Financial Markets Authority and Vienna Stock Exchange Conference in Vienna, Commissioner McCreevy outlined some of the recent developments of stock exchange mergers. “We are also witnessing MiFID-driven innovation”, he said mentioning the Project Turquoise; Project Boat; Chi-X; ICAP’s new ideas; and Equiduct. “This is what we want”, he continued. “We hope to see more to come”.
McCreavy outlined the two different threads that need to be separated. The threat on mutual recognition refers to
- EU-US mutual recognition in securities should be a gradual process, with successive steps carefully prepared by political understanding, working with regulators on both sides.
- Unilateral action by the SEC or bilateral deals between particular
- The same assessment criteria should be used by the
- A situation where some EU jurisdictions would be excluded from participating in the scheme for arbitrary, non-substantive reasons, would not be welcome for EU's integrating markets.
- Business conducted within the territory of the European Union should only be subject to the laws of the EU and the
The threat on convergence refers to the differences between national rulebooks across the world on a multitude of issues “such as frequency of reporting, thresholds for shareholder disclosures, client classification, and the like.”
“We think the right approach is to tackle mutual recognition while we have the chance, and tackle convergence more gradually over the longer-term and through expert international fora such as IOSCO”, the Commissioner stated.
Finally, on clearing and settlement issues and the first results that could be drawn from the Code of Conduct the Commissioner took note that a significant number of link requests already came from various market infrastructures.