The challenge of MiFID compliance
The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II is a revision of a legislative framework created by the European Union (EU) in 2007 to regulate financial markets and provide greater protection for investors. Updated in 2018, the new rules impose more reporting requirements and tests in order to increase transparency, requiring trading organizations to prove they have acted honestly, fairly, professionally and in the best interests of their clients at all times. MiFID compliance requires firms to capture all communications surrounding transactions, including email, telephone calls, social media and in-person meetings.
To ensure MiFID compliance, firms must monitor and store communications for up to seven years, creating a new level of compliance headache and records retention complexity for many financial organizations. As the volume of email data within financial service organizations continues to expand exponentially, MiFID compliance – along with other regulatory requirements like Dodd-Frank compliance and FINRA worm compliance – becomes increasingly difficult to manage. To achieve MiFID compliance while minimizing the burden of managing email retention, more financial services organizations everywhere are turning to Mimecast.
Simplifying MiFID compliance with Mimecast
Mimecast is a cloud-based email security and compliance platform that enables organizations to improve cyber resilience. Serving more than 40,000 customers globally, Mimecast provides solutions for email security, archiving, continuity and awareness training.
The Mimecast Cloud Archive is a modern, multi-purpose business enablement platform that provides immutable archives, robust supervisory features and compliance-driven chains of custody to help manage email HIPAA compliance, FINRA compliance and FIPS compliance along with MiFID compliance. By aggregating data across multiple platforms to create a single, secure cloud archive, Mimecast helps IT teams streamline management and reduce overhead while meeting MiFID compliance requirements and responding to compliance inquiries quickly and accurately.
Mimecast's cloud archive provides:
- Comprehensive compliance, e-discovery and litigation support including legal hold, retention, case management and data export.
- Self-service controls for compliance teams that relieve IT from needing to help with every compliance request.
- Data immutability by default and detailed activity logging.
- Search results guaranteed in seconds for early insight into MiFID compliance status.
- Fast and effective case review with automated culling to significantly reduce third-party costs.
Mimecast's compliance solutions integrate seamlessly with Mimecast security and targeted threat protection, enabling organizations to protect email data with powerful defenses. Mimecast's Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 threat intelligence provides up-to-the-minute insight into the latest threats to data within the most widely-used email platforms.
Modernize MiFID compliance workflows with Mimecast Supervision
To demonstrate MiFID compliance, supervision review personnel at financial firms must manage and review large amounts of data, searching for any evidence of potential malfeasance and flagging risk-laden content for further review. With vast amounts of content to review, it's easy for bottlenecks to slow this unwieldy process, reducing reviewer productivity and threatening timely MiFID compliance.
Mimecast Supervision is a solution that can be easily integrated with Mimecast Cloud Archive to enable compliance personnel to systematically review and discover targeted data within the enormous amount of communications subject to MiFID regulations. With Mimecast Supervision, reviewers can use an auditable and managed supervision review process to ensure productivity while managing MiFID compliance requirements.
Mimecast Supervision provides:
- Targeted detection rules to reduce false positives in sampling data and to focus on specific senders/recipients.
- Highlighting and filtering by end-user to accelerate the review process.
- Reporting on reviewer productivity to help identify bottlenecks in the compliance review process.
- Customizable workflow and multi-tier escalation.
FAQs: What is MiFID II?
What is MiFID II?
MiFID II is the Markets and Financial Instruments Directive II, an update to the original MiFID regulations launched in 2007 to help manage and transform Europe's financial industry. The updated regulations, which came into effect on January 3, 2018, are intended to offer greater protection to investors and to bring more transparency to all asset classes.
What will MiFID compliance require?
Complying with MiFID II requires firms to prove they have acted honestly and fairly in all trades and that they have put their client's best interests ahead of their own profit priorities and incentives. To prove their compliance, firms must retain all communications leading up to a transaction for a period of seven years.
Are firms outside the EU affected by MiFID compliance requirements?
Financial firms outside the EU may be impacted by MiFID II requirements and required to demonstrate MiFID compliance if they perform sub-advising for an EU fund manager, have an EU subadvisor, trade in EU securities on an EU regulated market or have an EU affiliate.
