EU Parliament adopts resolution on retail financial services

EU Parliament adopts resolution on retail financial services

The EU Parliament has adopted a resolution on retail financial services. Amongst other things, the resolution:

• highlights the need to develop initiatives and instruments that improve competition and allow consumers to identify and compare safe, sustainable and simple products within the range of products available to them;
• notes shortcomings in the national implementation of MiFID2 which, it argues, have led to labour-intensive reporting requirements for intermediaries that do not effectively enhance consumer protection and go beyond MiFID2 itself, and calls for lessons to be learned from this experience;
• calls on the Commission to address the issue of mis-selling of financial products and services and, in particular, calls on the Commission to monitor closely the implementation of new rules under MiFID2 which ban commission for independent financial advisers and restrict its use for non-independent advisers, and on the basis of that monitoring to consider whether those restrictions should be tightened;
• emphasises that, in order for the single market in retail financial services to be efficient and dynamic, there should be no unnecessary or unfair differences between euro and non-euro Member States, while arguing that the adoption of the single currency by all Member States without exception would make the single market for retail financial services more efficient and coherent;
• calls on the Commission to set up an EU comparison portal covering most or all parts of the retail financial services market;
• calls on the Commission to examine new approaches with the potential to give companies greater regulatory flexibility to experiment and be able to innovate, while maintaining high levels of consumer protection and safety;
• encourages the Commission to monitor the transposition and implementation of the Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD) and to analyse the impact of this legislation on the retail financial services market;
• asks the Commission to conduct, with the Member States, a joint analysis of the implementation and impact of EU legislation on retail financial services; and

asks the Commission to review the impact of the Credit Ratings Agencies Regulation in terms of products sold to retail consumers.