Improving benchmarks and reporting requirements in financial services and investment support

Key points

On data sharing and reducing administrative requirements in financial services and investment support, the EESC:

• welcomes the initiative to rationalise and simplify the supervisory reporting requirements and to avoid duplicate reporting requests,
• considers necessary to standardise the scope and format of the data involved in the exchange of information between authorities overseeing the financial sector;
• notes that the proposed changes may generate some implementation and/or further standardisation costs. Minimising costs should not be detached from the other objectives of data collection and data sharing;
• considers that future initiatives should establish that the delivery of data to one competent authority (or shared platform) is treated as delivery to all other competent authorities (one stop shop concept);
• notes that data sharing between authorities would remain subject to a voluntary request. In this regard, the authorities must (not only "may") enter into memoranda of understanding to specify the modalities of the exchange of information;
• underlines that in order to achieve simplification, regularly reviewing reporting requirements should be mandatory;

On the amendments to the Benchmark regulation, the EESC:

• welcomes a more balanced and proportionate approach to safeguarding financial stability and the integrity of European markets, as well as to reducing costs and regulatory requirements, in particular by reducing the requirements for non-significant benchmarks;
• welcomes the clarification of the role of the Commission, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) and the national authorities in the process applicable to significant and critical benchmarks;
• highly recommends checking whether any initiative to minimise reporting requirements or to save costs for critical or significant benchmarks is possible.