This past year was an eventful one for GreySpark’s thought leadership research practice. As always, we are very grateful to our loyal subscriber sponsors and readers, CMI Blog browsers and – indeed – to our subject matter expert colleagues across the capital markets industry, within GreySpark’s client base and within GreySpark as a whole for their commentary, feedback and general inputs into our now well-established research product.
In 2017, GreySpark has enjoyed a fruitful project pipeline in terms of helping its clients with many aspects of MiFID II. RTS 6 brought HFT and electronic trading very much into the spotlight, and our service offering approach has enabled us to assist many of our clients to document their governance and algorithms, which is a necessary requirement for all banks and brokers with an electronic business. We have also run significant projects working with clients to deliver their overall MiFID II programme, providing experienced subject matter experts in regulatory change, as well as seasoned project managers and programme managers. Implementing solutions for transaction reporting to provide transparency, and surveillance to capture market abuse, were also among the project themes that we were involved in throughout 2017.
When considering the potential impact that the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) could have on the entirety of the bloc’s corporate economic sector, look no further than the findings of an April 2017 Veritas survey in which 20% of the 900 respondents – characterised as “senior business decision makers” – expressed concern that, globally, non-compliance could put them out of business.
