Markets in
Financial Instruments Directive

Regulation such as MiFID creates business opportunity by facilitating cross-border trading, encouraging new services and opening innovative channels to market. Regulation is a catalyst for change - providing access to deeper and more liquid markets, new asset classes and new demographies. Industry initiatives that aim to exploit MiFID in order to create value, leverage competitive advantage or drive down costs are being readily announced.

Regulation necessitates increased levels of knowledge and information integration. It demands visibility and flexibility across increasingly complex, global operations and releases organisations uniqueness to seek competitive advantage from their intellectual property. MiFID also represents a long-term commitment to capital markets review and therefore introduces strategic implications from an IT infrastructure perspective.

To reduce costs of ongoing regulation, firms clearly need to align regulatory change programmes with existing projects to optimise use of resources and build flexibility into solutions to overcome constraints presented by existing fragmented IT infrastructures.

MiFID introduces a plethora of information management challenges. These challenges are not insurmountable and the technologies exist to address them. Those that invest by effectively supporting a business-led change programme are more likely to be able to take advantage of any resulting market uncertainty.

Working With The Industry

Oracle has been working closely with its clients, industry associations and partners to assist in the qualification of requirements, alignment of technologies and provision of solutions in response to MiFID.

Oracle has established the MiFID Partner Community comprising more than 40 vendors that aims to promote solutions developed by the Oracle partner network.

Oracle, i-flex and Mantas have combined expertise in compliance information management, behavior detection, consulting and services to deliver the most comprehensive Compliance Solutions Architecture available within the industry today.

Oracle is a member and contributor to the JWG-IT, the independent think-tank that aims to help financial institutions define workable solutions to the challenges posed by EU legislators and regulators. More specifically, Oracle is contributing to the JWG-IT Technology Special Interest Group (SIG) with the objective of defining MiFID reference architectures.

Oracle will shortly be publishing solution propositions for Client Management, Record Keeping, Transparency, Order Handling and Execution based on these reference architectures.