The HoL Financial Services Regulation Committee has published Nikhil Rathi’s response to questions set out in the letter of 30 April 2024.

The legislation establishes that, for the purposes of s271A of FSMA, HMT is approving each EEA state which will enable UCITS funds authorised in any EEA state, except those UCITS that are authorised as MMFs, to market to any UK client, subject to those funds being recognised to do so by FCA.  (Date in force: 16 July 2024)

The SI will revoke an existing equivalence decision, under Article 28(4) of UK MiFIR, for CFTC and re-enact the decision with an updated annex. The annex of the equivalence decision provides a list of the designated contract markets and swap execution facilities in the USA that are authorised by CFTC and are therefore able to fulfil the DTO for the UK.  (Date in force: 4 June 2024)

Fur­ther to its December 2023 statement, ESMA has published the final report containing guidelines on funds’ names using ESG or sus­tain­ab­il­ity-re­lated terms.  The guidelines establish that to be able to use these terms, a minimum threshold of 80% of investments should be used to meet environmental, social characteristics or sustainable investment objectives.  The guidelines also apply exclusion criteria for different terms used in certain fund names.

BIS has published a note of a meeting held on 13 May 2024 at which Basel III implementation and the cryptoasset standard was discussed.  It was agreed that implementation of the Committee’s prudential standard for banks’ cryptoasset exposures will be deferred by one year to 1 January 2026.