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SIFMA today issued the following statement from president and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr. on the House Financial Services Committee passage of H.R. 2622, which would direct the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) to extend the MiFID II no-action relief for six months and study the potential impact of the expiration of the relief:
“SIFMA applauds the House Financial Services Committee’s bipartisan, overwhelming vote for H.R. 2622, which would direct the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) to extend the MiFID II no-action relief for six months and study the potential impact of the expiration of the relief. The SEC staff’s no-action relief is set to expire in July 2023. Once the relief expires, U.S. broker-dealers receiving MiFID-required unbundled payments for research services would be subject to regulation as investment advisers under the Advisers Act, which has requirements that are fundamentally incompatible with how research and sales and trading services are typically provided to investment managers by broker-dealers and would layer on an entirely different regulatory regime than broker-dealers’ current comprehensive regulatory framework overseen by the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
“Without an extension of the no-action relief, impacted buy-side managers will lose access to important research services and the competitiveness of U.S. markets and research providers will be negatively impacted. SIFMA strongly believes there is no reason to ask U.S. firms to tie themselves in knots to comply with a European law when the EU is actively considering changes to it. The bipartisan support for directing the SEC to extend the no-action relief is the correct path forward.”
