On 11 February 2016 BETTER FINANCE sent an open letter to the Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union (DG FISMA) and to the Commissioner for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union to request that the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) follow up on its release of the results
BETTER FINANCE shares its first thoughts on the long-waited Green Paper on Building a Capital Markets Union (CMU), published by the European Commission last week. We welcome the initiative and fully agree that “capital markets need to play a larger role in channeling financing to the economy” but our concern lies with the lack of attention
BETTER FINANCE (EuroFinUse – the European Federationof Financial Services Users) is co-organizing a conference at the European Parliament with its Spanish member organisation ADICAE to discuss the impact of the latest regulatory updates on non-cash payments in the EU on consumers. Rapporteur for the MIFs Regulation and ECON Vice-President Pablo Zalba will be opening the breakfast meeting. BETTER FINANCE applauds the European Commission’s proposal for a legislative package in the fieldof the EU payments framework, comprising a welcome cap on Multilateral Interchange
EuroFinuse supports the main objective of the European Financial Transaction Tax (FTT), “to ensure that financial institutions make a fair and substantial contribution to covering the costs of the recent crisis…and to ring-fence the real economy, SMEs, housholds etc.”But EuroFinuse is very concerned that the latest European Commission proposal does not meet at all this
Earlier this year BETTER FINANCE called on policy makers to put an end to financial abuses by ensuring better public enforcement of conduct of business rules and introducing an EU-wide framework for Collective Redress in order to facilitate effective private enforcement. Now the European Commissioner for Justice and Consumer Affairs is calling for an EU-wide
In his speech at the 2016 ECB/EC financial integration conference in Frankfurt, Guillaume Prache, Managing Director of BETTER FINANCE, discusses the Capital Markets Union and the impact it will have on retail investors. Please read the full speech here.
Is robo-advice really such a revolutionary concept? Some see it as a way of providing reasonable-quality financial advice to mass-market investors unwilling to pay a human. Others see job cuts and a certain unwelcome shirking of responsibility. One could argue that a roboadviser is just a poor man’s human being – and, indeed, research from
Juan Manuel Viver, Policy Officer at BETTER FINANCE, reacts to the launch by Lord Hill of the Green Paper on retail financial services in a video released by EU Reporter. Viver underlines the importance of turning our attention to consumers as well, since the Commission focused on stabilizing the financial sector after the crisis but
Juan Manuel Viver, Policy Officer at BETTER FINANCE, was quoted in Ignites Europe – the Financial Times’ supplement covering the funds industry – on the call for a cap on the number of fund board directorships held by some Irish industry professionals. The call by a senior EU financial consumer advocate comes following a study carried out by the Irish fund industry regulator which showed that 13 individuals held
The Swedish government is to become the first in Europe to formally investigate closet-tracking funds that charge high fees for active management but do little more than mimic an index. No other national authority has formally investigated the issue. It has received more attention in Sweden after the Swedish Shareholders Association (Aktiespararna, member organisation of