LONDON (Reuters) – The European Union’s executive European Commission set out 16 measures on Thursday to deepen the bloc’s capital market over five years.
The measures are:
-Creating a “European single access point” to provide financial information on companies to the public;
-Assessing if listing rules for small companies could be further simplified;
-Review of EU rules for long-term investment funds or ELTIFs to make them more attractive;
-Review of capital rules for insurers and banks to encourage investment in long-term projects;
-Analyse feasibility of requiring banks to direct small companies, whose loan application they have rejected, to alternative providers of funding;
-Review of securitisation rules for possible amendments to help banks lend more;
-Assessment of how to improve the public’s knowledge and understanding of finance;
-Build up retail investor trust, potentially by requiring financial advisers to obtain a certificate that proves their level of knowledge;
-Develop best practices in pension auto-enrolment to get more people to save for their retirement;
-Introduce a common, standardised EU-wide system for withholding tax to cut red tape for cross-border investors;
-Harmonise or increased convergence in insolvency rules;
-Making it easier for shareholders to engage with companies, including how they can vote;
-Streamline cross-border settlement of financial transactions;
-Create a “consolidated tape” or record of stock trades to give investors a single snapshot of best market prices for share and equity like instruments;
-Stronger and better enforced investor protection;
-Enhance single rulebook for capital markets, assess need to further harmonise rules, and monitor progress towards convergence in market supervision and learn regulatory lessons from collapse of German payments company Wirecard.
Reporting by Huw Jones, Editing by William Maclean