Investment Services
Veerle A. Colaert · 2024
Abstract This chapter deals with the question whether EU investment services regulation should be included in a European Capital Markets Code (ECMC), and if so, whether any changes to the current regime are necessary or highly desirable to make an ECMC feasible or to highly improve its logic or usefulness. For the purposes of this chapter, investment services are all services from financial intermediaries to individual clients with respect to investment products traded on regulated trading venues, or which derive their value from such products and therefore present similar risks to investors. They include services relating to financial instruments, structured deposits, crypto-assets, insurance-based investment products, personal pension products, and certain crowdfunding products. Via those investment services financial intermediaries give investors access to the capital markets, which would otherwise remain largely inaccessible to them. We argue that investment services regulation should therefore be a key part of the ECMC. However, to avoid unnecessary duplications, regulatory arbitrage, compliance difficulties, and ultimately investor detriment, the introduction of one single conduct of business regime for all investment intermediaries and investment products is advocated, even if this means that for certain investment products the current regimes would change quite substantially.