SIX Financial Information is standing ready to help firms meet the data and document exchange requirements of Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) and Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products (PRIIPs) – both of which regulations have early January 2018 compliance deadlines.
The company released its Regulatory Document Hub (RegHub) a month or so ago and is now onboarding product manufacturers and customers, and testing the solution in readiness for MiFID II and PRIIPs compliance. It is also working on adding data and document exchange for FIDLEG, the Swiss Financial Services Act that mirrors MiFID II requirements and is expected to come into force some time in 2018.
RegHub was initially developed to support PRIIPs Key Information Documents (KIDs) in line with a compliance deadline of January 2017, which was pushed back by the European Commission to January 2018 after a failure to finalise Regulatory Technical Standards. In consultation with industry, it was then extended to support MiFID II investor protection requirements such as the need for product manufacturers to define target markets for their products and understand from wealth managers who the products have been sold to.
Philip Lynch, head of markets, products and strategy at SIX Financial Information, explains: “Our owning banks said they didn’t have the facility to support such structured requirements, so we collaborated to build the RegHub platform.” The hub is populated by about 500 product manufacturers, although this number is expected to rise to nearer 1,200 by the end of the year, and allows manufacturers to distribute documents in real time to permissioned asset managers and wealth managers through application programming interfaces (APIs).
In response to MiFID II requirements, the hub is connected to the ANNA Derivatives Service Bureau, allowing OTC product manufactures to obtain ISIN identifiers for OTC products. On a broader scale, the platform acts as a central source for investor protection data, allowing product data, information and documents to be structured and exchanged in real-time and in a standardised way with the right format for each regulation. Information and documents can also be requested on demand at the point of sale.
Lynch comments: “The exchange of information in real time has never before been a requirement, but PRIIPS and MiFID II make it a ‘must do’. RegHub, with its ready to consume data, will help banks automate and scale their operations, reducing costs and increasing the speed of compliance.”
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