In a comment on the conclusion of the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (MiFIR) negotiations on 29 June 2023, the Association for Financial Markets in Europe (AFME) shares its opinion that legislators might not have done enough to prevent “suboptimal outcomes”. In particular, the organisation says that it “regrets” the failure to create “an ambitious, real-time equity consolidated tape with sufficient pre-trade information”.
The type of information the tape should carry was a point of contention in the negotiations. Many exchanges have resisted the call for including real-time pre-trade data in the tape since the selling of such data is an important stream of income for them.
AFME, however, says that a consolidated tape “was an opportunity to create a single, worldwide window to the equity market in the EU and to reduce the costs of market data, which has been a long-standing issue in assessing Europe’s competitiveness”. The decision to exclude pre-trade information on the equity consolidated tape was thus “a missed opportunity for developing the Capital Markets Union and its key aspiration for easier access to equity capital markets, as well as for mobilising investors and supporting issuers.”.
