ÍøÆسԹÏ

The Savings and Investments Union – Reducing cross-border fragmentation and gold-plating

The Savings and Investments Union (SIU) is the European Commission's flagship financial reform package and the successor to the Capital Markets Union and Banking Union. It aims to channel Europe's savings more efficiently into productive investment and to make the EU's financial system simpler, faster and more globally competitive. ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï supports that ambition and argues that scaling EU capital markets also means attracting external capital: Swiss foreign direct investment in the EU stood at around EUR 630 billion in 2024, close to half of all FDI originating from Switzerland. ÍøÆسԹÏ’s advocacy concentrates on four practical levers.

• Strengthening ESMA's coordination and data-sharing powers without layering duplicative supervisory structures.
• Consistent, risk-based proportionality applied across financial rules, rather than one-size-fits-all requirements or ill-fitting mergers of the UCITS, AIFMD and MiFID regimes.
• End Member State gold-plating of fund passporting notifications, which delays and inflates the cost of cross-border distribution. And we want the SIU opened to trusted third countries through an institution-based approach that would give firms from closely connected, high-standard jurisdictions such as Switzerland a single point of entry under EU rules and oversight.

The Eligible Assets Directive (EAD) Review – Protecting UCITS as a global standard

ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï responded to ESMA's technical advice to the European Commission on the review of the UCITS Eligible Assets Directive, a cornerstone of the EU's investment framework and the foundation of a brand recognised worldwide for safety, liquidity and diversification. The file matters directly to our members: Swiss asset managers oversee more than EUR 800 billion in EU-domiciled funds, roughly EUR 680 billion of it in Luxembourg and EUR 100 billion in Ireland, while UCITS of more than CHF 1 trillion are distributed in Switzerland. ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï cautions against wholesale adoption of ESMA's recommendations. They risk requalifying established strategies as AIFs, triggering mandate breaches and outflows from EU products. They would impose a universal look-through that is operationally impracticable and cuts across contractual confidentiality and the EU's own Securitisation Regulation. And they could disqualify instruments such as catastrophe bonds, shrinking market depth and raising hedging costs for insurers and pension funds on both sides of the border. Tightening eligibility without global alignment would push fund domiciliation, service providers and talent outside the EU, the opposite of what the SIU sets out to achieve. ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï calls instead for rigorous data collection and a holistic appraisal of existing supervisory frameworks before the most restrictive option is mandated for all regulators.

The Delegation Regime – Preserving a proven model and a level playing field

Delegation is the operational backbone of European asset management. It allows managers to source portfolio management and other expertise wherever it sits, while home-state authorisation, letter-box entity rules and supervisory cooperation keep accountability firmly in the EU. The Market Integration and Supervision Package (MISP) reopens this file barely after the AIFMD review settled it, proposing a derogation from certain delegation requirements for intra-group arrangements confined to the EU.

ÍøÆØ³Ô¹Ï questions both the rationale and the design. A derogation drawn along geographic lines would tier the industry, advantaging managers whose group structures happen to sit inside the Union and penalising those delegating to entities in third countries. That would be an unfortunate precedent in EU law and one at odds with the SIU's openness objectives.

ÍøÆسԹÏ’s preference is to build on the existing toolbox through a genuinely risk-based approach covering all delegation arrangements and all functions. Should a derogation nonetheless proceed, it must be extended to intra-group arrangements with non-EU entities where supervisory cooperation is already in place, which for Switzerland means the AIFMD cooperation arrangements maintained by FINMA and, for UCITS, the IOSCO Multilateral MoU and bilateral securities MoUs. It should also be broadened beyond the EU group definition, applied to non-core as well as core functions, and made available to non-EU distributors acting on their own behalf.