The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published a compliance table under the Markets in Cryptoassets Regulation (MiCAR) setting out member state compliance with its guidelines on when a third-country firm is deemed to solicit clients established or situated in the EU, and the supervision practices to detect and prevent circumvention of the reverse solicitation exemption under MiCAR. This follows an earlier compliance table published on 5 May, setting out member state compliance with ESMA's guidelines on procedures and policies (including client rights) in the context of cryptoasset transfer services under MiCAR on investor protection.

The BIS Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (CPMI) and the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) have published a joint consultation and updated versions of their 2017 central counterparties (CCP) resilience guidance, and their 2015 public quantitative disclosure standards (PQDs) for CCPs. The purpose of the proposed amendments is to incorporate relevant proposals from the January 2025 BCBS-CPMI-IOSCO report on the transparency and responsiveness of initial margin in centrally cleared markets. The proposed amendments address areas such as the use of margin simulation tools, measurement of initial margin responsiveness, governance of margin models, the use of margin model overrides, and enhancements to CCP public disclosures. The consultation clarifies that the proposed amendments are not intended to create additional standards for CCPs beyond those set out in the Principles for Financial Market Infrastructure. The deadline for comments is 30 June.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published a statement announcing it is launching a review of the claims management market, prompted by concerns that some claims management companies (CMCs) and law firms are delivering poor consumer outcomes. The review will examine the root causes of poor practices across the market, including aggressive marketing, misleading advertising, unfair exit fees, and instances where consumers are being signed up without their consent or by multiple firms, leading to confusion and delaying compensation. While these issues in relation to motor finance claims have been brought into sharper focus, the FCA has also noted concerns about the handling of other claims.

Working with the Solicitors Regulation Authority and other regulatory partners, the FCA will examine: (i) whether consumers receive fair value, and whether existing price caps are still fit for purpose; (ii) financial incentives and whether these create potential conflicts of interest; and (iii) review whether the full end-to-end consumer journey, including lead generation, marketing and advertising, delivers good consumer outcomes. The review will also consider whether different approaches across different regulatory regimes affect firm behaviour and if some firms are failing to secure the appropriate permissions. The FCA expects full and open cooperation from all firms in the review and indicates that it, together with its regulatory and enforcement partners, may take robust action where this is not the case. It will also make recommendations to the government for any potential legislative reform, including whether CMCs and law firms should be subject to stronger compensation mechanisms if they cause harm.

The UK Financial Conduct Authority has announced the creation of a joint regulatory taskforce—with the Solicitors Regulation Authority, Information Commissioner's Office and Advertising Standards Authority—to tackle poor practices in the handling of motor finance claims by certain claims management companies and law firms. The taskforce will coordinate intelligence sharing and take targeted, coordinated actions using the full extent of their powers to mitigate harm to consumers. Regulatory actions will be progressed, with outcomes communicated jointly, signalling a unified regulatory response and clear expectations for market behaviour. The taskforce will focus on addressing misleading advertising and sign-up processes, meritless claims, multiple representation and unfair exit fees. It will also look at firms' financial and operational resilience including, but not limited to, the quality and integrity of accounting and audit practices. The taskforce will run for a minimum of six months followed by a progress review.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) has published a report on vulnerabilities in private credit. The FSB notes that, while private credit brings benefits such as tailored finance for companies and investor diversification, it also embeds several vulnerabilities. The report focuses on the potential vulnerabilities around bank interlinkages; borrower credit risk and opacity in valuation practices; concentration, leverage and liquidity issues; and data challenges faced by regulators when monitoring exposures. The FSB also highlights that private credit remains untested in a prolonged economic downturn and so warrants close attention.

Looking ahead, the FSB encourages regulatory authorities to: (i) address data challenges, including those related to the lack of granular fund and loan-level data and the absence of harmonised global definitions; (ii) deepen analysis of interlinkages of private credit with private equity and insurers and of liquidity mismatches in private credit funds; and (iii) share supervisory approaches on risk management and governance for banks and non-banks active in private credit, including aggregation of exposures, valuation practices and the use of private ratings.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has launched a consultation on a new approach to updating the parameters for stress test scenarios under the Money Market Funds (MMF) Regulation. Under the MMF Regulation, ESMA is required to develop guidelines establishing common reference parameters of the stress test scenarios to be included in the stress tests that MMFs or managers of MMFs are required to conduct and update these guidelines annually based on the input provided by the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB).

ESMA proposes to replace the annual update of the parameters included in the guidelines (section 5 of the guidelines that includes the calibrations) with an annual update of a dedicated page on the ESMA website where the parameters would be made available. This approach is intended to streamline the update of the parameters, improve accessibility for MMF managers across the EU, and provide greater flexibility in terms of timing, as the new parameters would be immediately available and applicable without waiting for the translations of the guidelines to be finalised. The guidelines would continue to set out the framework and methodology for MMF stress testing, while the ESMA webpage would exclusively be used to publish the updated annual calibration of the parameters. From a supervisory perspective, the change would allow market participants to use the new set of parameters closer to the publication of the related ESRB scenario and reduce the risk of discrepancies. The change is also intended to reduce burden and simplify the process for ESMA and national competent authorities, in line with ESMA's simplification and burden reduction initiative.

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The UK Parliament has published an updated webpage confirming that the Listed Investment Companies (Classification etc) Bill, a Private Members' Bill introduced in September 2024, will make no further progress as the 2024-2026 session of Parliament has come to an end. The Bill made provision about listed investment companies; the classification and characteristics of those companies; and for connected purposes. It related to collective investment undertakings of the closed-end type, the shares of which are admitted to trading on any market or venue operated by a UK recognised investment exchange, known as Listed Closed-End Investment Companies and did not relate to collective investment undertakings other than the closed-end type.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published official translations of its final guidelines on internal controls for benchmark administrators (BMAs), credit rating agencies (CRAs) and market transparency infrastructures (MTIs), which include trade repositories, data reporting services providers and securitisation repositories. They repeal and replace ESMA's previous CRA-specific internal control guidance, extend coverage to BMAs and MTIs, and update expectations to address technology-related risks and integration of new technologies. The final report was initially published by ESMA in December 2025. The guidelines will apply from 1 October.

The European Commission has adopted a Delegated Regulation supplementing the European Market Infrastructure Regulation ((EU) No 648/2012) (EMIR), specifying the method for the determination of fees charged by the European Banking Authority (EBA) for the validation of pro forma initial margin models. EMIR, as amended by EMIR 3, requires that counterparties apply for authorisation to their competent authorities before using, or adopting a change to, a model for initial margin calculation used as a risk-mitigation technique for over-the-counter (OTC) derivative contracts not cleared by a central counterparty. The EBA is required to establish a central validation function for the elements and general aspects of pro forma models, and any changes to those. It can also charge an annual fee per pro forma model to counterparties using the pro forma models it validates.

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The Capital Requirements Regulation (Market Risk Transitional Provision) Regulations 2026 (which were made on 29 April) has been published, together with an explanatory memorandum. The Regulations relate to changes to the UK implementation of Basel 3.1. They insert a new Article 465A into the UK Capital Requirements Regulation as a transitional provision relating to the UK Prudential Regulation Authority's (PRA) internal model approach rules. This means that credit institutions and designated investment firms will not be required to apply the PRA's market risk rules on updated internal model requirements during the transitional period between 1 January 2027 and 31 December 2027. The PRA rules will allow institutions to continue to use their existing models during this transitional period until 1 January 2028. The draft version of the Regulations was published in March. The Regulations will come into force on 30 December.

The Eurosystem has published a report setting out targeted proposals to strengthen the macroprudential framework for non-bank financial intermediation (NBFI), aimed at addressing growing systemic risks arising from the sector's expansion and interconnectedness with banks.

The proposals include:

• Implementing internationally agreed reforms to the NBFI regulatory framework in the EU.
• Enhancing the macroprudential toolkit, including through the introduction of an explicit macroprudential tool for ex ante mitigation of the risk of liquidity mismatch in open-ended funds.
• Introducing system-wide stress testing (SWST) in Europe to identify and quantify short-term market and liquidity risks, while considering their interplay with solvency risk. The proposed SWST exercise would target the entities and markets that matter most for EU financial stability, with key markets in scope including: sovereign bond markets; unsecured short-term funding markets; covered and corporate bond markets; interest rate; and foreign exchange derivatives markets and repo markets.

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The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published its final report on the integrated collection of funds' data, as part of its broader simplification and burden reduction agenda for EU reporting frameworks and due to legislative changes introduced by the Directive amending the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) and the Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities (UCITS) Directive (AIFMD II). ESMA proposes moving away from fragmented national reporting requirements towards a common EU reporting framework based on a single reporting template, designed to be proportionate to different fund sizes and investment strategies, with the aim of reducing duplication and improving data consistency. This would operate under a hybrid operational model, with data collected at national level but with data validation, storage and analytics being organised at EU level. The EU-level centralised data hub would facilitate data sharing between authorities and limit duplicative data requests.

ESMA will take forward the conclusions of the report in the context of its forthcoming work on the regulatory and implementing technical standards under AIFMD II. It will publish a consultation paper later this year, with the aim of finalising the technical standards by April 2027. After that, the implementation of the new template and the remaining recommendations will be phased in, with the first phase integrating reporting under AIFMD II, and the second phase expanding the integrated framework to other reporting obligations. The go-live of reporting is expected in H1 2029 at the earliest.

The European Parliament's (EP) Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) has published a draft report (dated 28 April) on the European Commission's proposal for a Regulation amending the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (EU) 2019/2088 (SFDR), Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014 on key information documents for packaged retail and insurance-based investment products (PRIIPs) and repealing Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2022/1288. The proposal, known as SFDR 2.0, was adopted in November 2025. The report contains a draft EP legislative resolution which sets out amendments to the proposed Regulation. For more background on SFDR 2.0, particularly its impact on funds and asset managers, you may wish to read our article "SFDR 2.0 overhaul: impact of the new categories and disclosures on funds and asset managers".

ESMA has published an interim report on transaction reporting on the call for evidence on a comprehensive approach for the simplification of financial transaction reporting under the Markets in Financial Instruments Regulation (600/2014) (MiFIR), the European Market Infrastructure Regulation ((EU) No 648/2012) (EMIR), the Securities Financing Transactions Regulation ((EU) 2015/2365) (SFTR) and sectoral regulation. The report was published as part of ESMA's broader simplification and burden reduction agenda for EU reporting frameworks. The interim report provides a summary of the feedback to its June 2025 call for evidence.

Most respondents indicated that overlapping and inconsistent reporting requirements, frequent and unsynchronised regulatory changes, fragmented reporting channels and dual reporting are major drivers of cost and complexity. Further to the feedback it received, ESMA has updated the four guiding principles presented in the call for evidence. They now focus on preserving information value, decreasing overlaps, pursuing global alignment and balancing costs and benefits. The feedback has also enabled ESMA to carry out more detailed analysis on two of its proposed simplification options, namely scenario 1a (delineation by type of instrument) and scenario 2a (report once model).

The report does not yet include policy recommendations. Next steps for ESMA include further engagement with market participants, including through an open hearing on 28 May, before publishing final recommendations expected by July.