“Will there be people who sit back and watch and see how markets develop? Absolutely, there will be. But it is important to recognize the longer-term change that this represents for the industry,” Rebecca Healey, head of EMEA market structure and strategy at Liquidnet, told CNBC on Wednesday.
The original Mifid arrived in November 2007, just as the dam of the financial crisis was about to break wide open. Its intent was to help Europe integrate its disparate financial markets and drive down trading costs.
Its main focus was on stocks, but now Mifid II aims to widen the rules to incorporate other asset classes.
It is also an attempt to better regulate over-the-counter (OTC) contracts, which involve direct transactions between a buyer and a seller, by pushing them on to exchanges.
