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

SIX Financial Information Develops Utility for Compliance with Investor Protection Rules

Subscribe to our newsletter

SIX Financial Information is developing a document management utility designed to help financial institutions comply with investor protection rules issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and due to take effect on January 1st 2017. The rules are also an element of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II), a European regulation that is expected to come into force in January 2018.

The ESMA investor protection rules require manufacturers and distributors of Packaged Retail and Insurance based Investment Products (PRIIPs), including investment banks, wealth management firms and portfolio managers, to produce standardised Key Information Documents (KIDs) that describe each product in plain language and make the documents available to private individuals resident in the European Economic Area before a PRIIP is bought.

SIX’s solution to compliance with the rules is a multi-tenanted utility that allows documents to be created once and used many times. The utility is built on underlying technology from Ariva, a specialist in structured product documents, and uses law firm Ashurst to provide legal content that must be included in KIDs and provided in many languages to meet to meet the requirements of the rules.

Using the SIX utility, PRIIP manufacturers will be able to create documents in near real time and make sure they are kept up to date using reference and market data from SIX. The PRIIP KIDs can then be fed into a bank’s core banking software or trading platform, while product distributors can use the utility to browse KIDs from any issuer and deliver them to retail investors on demand. To date, a large number of issuers of documents have shown interest in using the distribution platform within the utility. The documents are permissioned for distributor access by the utility and can be downloaded as PDFs or viewed via an electronic link to the utility.

Phillip Lynch, head of markets, products and strategy at SIX Financial Information, explains: “Our aim is to take the pressure off clients by reducing the cost and complexity of meeting the rules. We remove uncertainty about how to put new processes in place and allow clients to take advantage of a scalable, utility approach to investor protection.”

The SIX service is in demonstration mode and is expected to start signing up customers on a licence basis in the second half of this year as the regulatory deadline approaches. Lynch says there is a lot of client interest in the service, which can provide compliance with not only ESMA’s upcoming investor protection rules, but also MiFID II investor protection requirements and regulations around Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) that will make them PRIIPs requiring KIDs in 2020.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: End-to-End Lineage for Financial Services: The Missing Link for Both Compliance and AI Readiness

The importance of complete robust end-to-end data lineage in financial services and capital markets cannot be overstated. Without the ability to trace and verify data across its lifecycle, many critical workflows – from trade reconciliation to risk management – cannot be executed effectively. At the top of the list is regulatory compliance. Regulators demand a...

BLOG

Scale and Governance Top Drivers of Modern Data Architecture Plans: Webinar Review

Financial institutions are investing in modern technology architectures to bolster the flexibility and scalability of their data management processes as the number of use cases for that information, and the volume of data they ingest, expands. They are also seizing on the latest architectures to strengthen data governance in response to the growing complexity of...

EVENT

TradingTech Summit London

Now in its 15th year the TradingTech Summit London brings together the European trading technology capital markets industry and examines the latest changes and innovations in trading technology and explores how technology is being deployed to create an edge in sell side and buy side capital markets financial institutions.

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,...