Federation Of European Securities Exchanges Response To Recent Calls By The European Commission To Tackle The Remaining Obstacles To Cross Border Clearing And Settlement Of Securities

Please find attached FESE's response to recent calls by the European Commission to tackle the remaining obstacles in the area of clearing and settlement of securities. Our response was presented to Commission services today.

In summary,

1. Our objectives are to open access to post trading services, to further improve transparency of prices and freedom of choice for traders through the development of cross-border links between securities service providers.
2. There are two ways to reach these objectives: increased consolidation of European exchanges and increased interoperability between the differing clearing and settlement providers (a number of concrete examples of interoperability agreements are provided in our paper).
3. There are a number of conditions to allow increased interoperability between the CSD and the CCPs which are set out in our paper.
4. FESE proposes to initiate a European Interoperability Agreement with CCPs, CSDs and users to tackle cross-border obstacles
5. However, we caution against the adoption of a directive to tackle the problems in the field of cross border. Instead we call on the Commission to tackle the remaining legal and fiscal barriers within the CESAME process.