Available data and evidence show significant increases in the trading and investing activity of EU households, sparked by a new wave of young, previously inactive, non-professional investors. Many EU retail investors increased their exposure to listed equities and started to invest via execution-only services (brokerage accounts). Besides flattening the illiquidity curve during the period of
It is very welcome that the Commission prepares both a Renewed Sustainable Finance Strategy for July 2021, and an unprecedented, horizontal Retail Investment Strategy for early 2022. This briefing focuses on the retail investment aspects of the Renewed Sustainable Finance Strategy and on the sustainability aspects of the Retail Investment Strategy. It does not aim
BETTER FINANCE welcomes the Delegated act obligations for certain large undertakings to publish non-financial information. The rules set out in the delegated act clarify and allow for the translation of the technical screening criteria of the Climate Delegated Act (and the future Environmental Delegated Act) into quantitative economic performance indicators that will need to be
Regulations on Markets in Crypto Assets and the EU Pilot Regime for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) based market infrastructures BETTER FINANCE welcomes the initiatives and efforts of EU public authorities to accommodate emerging technologies in financial services whilst maintaining a safe and stable environment for consumers and financial services users to benefit from our single
With the termination of the intra-EU bilateral investment treaties (BITs) in 2020 – which received significant criticism for overlapping with the EU single market rules – the EC launched an initiative to improve the investor protection and facilitation framework at EU level. This initiative was reiterated in the new Capital Markets Union (CMU) Action Plan
While the aim of the EU Ecolabel should be to guide retail investors towards truly sustainable financial products, and at the same time avoid the greenwashing of unsustainable investments, the current proposal creates the exact opposite scenario for the label. It is labeling unsustainable investments as “green” and not sufficiently promoting targeted and genuine sustainable
The BETTER FINANCE welcomes the proposal put forward by the European Commission to simplify Prospectus disclosure rules for equity issuers in order to stimulate equity financing by companies in need and restore sustainable debt-equity ratios. We believe that both Capital Markets Union (CMU) and COVID-19 recovery policies should be tailored to attract more EU households
BETTER FINANCE thanks the ECB for this initiative to reach out to EU citizens as users of financial services and to the “civil society” at large. We acknowledge the major role of the ECB in addressing many short-term issues arising from the 2008 financial crisis and today from the COVID one: Financial repression at unprecedented
BETTER FINANCE welcomes the ECON’s legislative own-initiative report on Digital Finance assessing the regulatory and supervisory challenges on the digital financial market in order to guarantee a resilient digital financial system. BETTER FINANCE believes that the EC should attempt to better coordinate the parallel consultations (Mifid II, Digital Finance Strategy, Sustainable finance Strategy) – as
The Commission is currently developing the EU Ecolabel for Retail Financial Products within the framework of the Sustainable Finance Action Plan. The Joint Research Center (JRC) has presented a proposal discussed at the stakeholder meeting on 25 and 26 March to which we provide comments in this paper. The current climate and environmental crises plead