On 12 May 2015, the Luxembourg Stock Exchange (LuxSE) held the thirty-third edition of its annual Stock Exchange Day, a flagship event for Luxembourg’s financial community.
This year, LuxSE was pleased to welcome as keynote speaker Steven Maijoor, chair of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), who spoke on the planned capital markets union (CMU) and its priorities.
CMU is an initiative of the European Commission, the objective of which is to enable businesses to access capital more efficiently and cheaply from diverse sources and to create a single market for capital for all Member States by removing barriers to cross-border investments.
Steven Maijoor said “Europe needs to develop alternative funding channels to ensure that the benefits of capital markets and non-banking institutions are maximized for the real economy.”
Opening the event, Frank Wagener, LuxSE Chairman, stressed the opportunity to use regulation as a trigger to rethink the functioning of global businesses and to take the opportunity to innovate.
Continuing the theme, Robert Scharfe, LuxSE CEO, announced the launch of major strategic projects to address some of the challenges within the capital markets. Amongst these are the need to assure permanent transparency by providing the best possible access to consistent and exhaustive data in the interest of issuers, regulators and investors and the need to reduce the risk in financial transactions by eliminating as much as possible counterparty risk.
The thirty-third Stock Exchange Day also marked the tenth anniversary of LuxSE’s exchange-regulated market, the Euro MTF. Operating as a multilateral trading facility, this has become the leading MTF in Europe for securities listing and now accounts for around 25% of all listings at LuxSE.
Robert Scharfe said, “Capital markets keep evolving at a fast pace and are subject to structural changes that require forward-looking ideas and solutions. Our track record as a nimble first mover encourages us to proactively seek out new and additional services and new ways to help develop well-functioning capital markets.”
