About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Anyone for MiFID III?

Subscribe to our newsletter

By Steve Grob, Director of Group Strategy, Fidessa

I was chatting with the Reg folks here at Fidessa Towers yesterday and the spectre of MiFID III came up. Before you all jump off the window ledge, there is no official notion of this yet, but when will the regulators feel that their work really is done?

The direction of travel has been clear for a while – dismantle the current industry and replace it with something that is utilitarian, uniform and, above all, safe. At the heart of this is the regulator’s poster child ‘outcomes for end investors’ and making sure that their investment dollars are spent properly.

It seems, therefore, that the regulatory cross hairs are going to focus even more on the buy-side than the sell-side moving forwards. Once research has been unbundled and paid for explicitly, won’t that just raise the issue of brokers providing trading screens, FIX connectivity and other services to their buy-side clients that are not directly paid for? To make matters worse, the buy-side is fighting a fierce rear-guard action against passive investment, which means it is hardly in a position to pass any extra costs on to end investors. The net result will be less choice, as buy-side firms exit the business.

The real issue is trust – either I trust my supplier (Amazon, BMW, Ocado) and will keep using them, or I don’t and I won’t (VW, Samsung). Commercial reality is far better at making this happen than the increasingly forensic and globally inconsistent approach of regulators.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: The future of market data – Harnessing cloud and AI for market data distribution and consumption

Market data is the lifeblood of trading, but as data volumes grow and real-time demands increase, traditional approaches to distribution and consumption are being pushed to their limits. Cloud technology and AI-driven solutions are rapidly transforming how financial institutions manage, process, and extract value from market data, offering greater scalability, efficiency, and intelligence. This webinar,...

BLOG

From Sandbox to Scale-Up: How the FCA Plans to Shape UK Fintech Growth

In her address at Merchant Taylors’ Hall on 17 September 2025, Jessica Rusu, the FCA’s Chief Data, Information and Intelligence Officer, set out a comprehensive programme of initiatives underpin the regulator’s growth and innovation agenda. The speech, “Regulating for growth – the future is now”, presented four central pillars: strengthening crypto oversight, advancing artificial intelligence...

EVENT

AI in Capital Markets Summit London

The AI in Capital Markets Summit will explore current and emerging trends in AI, the potential of Generative AI and LLMs and how AI can be applied for efficiencies and business value across a number of use cases, in the front and back office of financial institutions. The agenda will explore the risks and challenges of adopting AI and the foundational technologies and data management capabilities that underpin successful deployment.

GUIDE

Regulatory Data Handbook 2025 – Thirteenth Edition

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of A-Team Group’s Regulatory Data Handbook, a unique and practical guide to capital markets regulation, regulatory change, and the data and data management requirements of compliance across Europe, the UK, US and Asia-Pacific. This year’s edition lands at a moment of accelerating regulatory divergence and intensifying data focused supervision. Inside,...