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From the beginning, EFAMA has been strongly supportive of the creation of a harmonised European supervisory framework with powerful European authorities cooperating closely with national supervisors in order to ensure a well‐functioning supervisory system. Indeed, because of the crossborder nature of their activities and products (e.g. UCITS) our members have a strong interest in particular in the development of a single EU rule book that will prevent Member States from goldplating or from regulatory dumping and thus reduce legal uncertainties and decrease significantly the huge compliance costs faced by EFAMA members when they operate on the securities markets of all 28 EU Member States.
EFAMA wishes to take the opportunity of this review to identify a number of areas in which it sees room for improvements and to make a number of recommendations in that respect: It is too early to proceed with substantial reforms of the ESFS. The opportunity of this review should nevertheless be used to clarify the objectives and boundaries of some of the competences granted to the ESAs, in particular the power to issue guidelines or recommendations, which may have been misused in a number of cases.
Although it partly exceeds the scope of this review, EFAMA also believes that the Level 2 process, as it is currently conducted and in which the ESAs are playing a big role, is not sufficiently transparent and could be considerably improved, in particular in the areas of oversight and accountability. To that end, EFAMA would recommend organizing public consultation on specific points were the Commission decides to depart from ESA's technical advices and granting the ESA an observer seat at the Level 1 negotiation table.
Aside from the development of regulations and standards, EFAMA believes that the ESAs should play a more active role in ensuring a consistent application of EU law and supervisory practices through a wider use of their powers in this field (e.g. peer reviews, breach of Union law procedures).