A Year On: Transaction cost reporting under PRIIPS and MiFID II
In the runup to 1 January 2018, financial firms the world over rushed to select service providers for the various tools required to comply with PRIIPS and MiFID II. Decisions were not necessarily made with validation that the products, vendors or data sources they had selected were indeed best-suited to the firm’s needs, but rather with the goal of ensuring that the selected solution allowed the firm to “check the boxes” related to the RTS.
A year on, firms are rethinking some of those decisions. While many of their selections will be fine for the time being, others turned out to be underwhelming, if not altogether vaporware. Still others were Band-Aid decisions that were suitable for the immediate need, but not the long term. Transaction cost calculations are proving to be a notably affected area, with a surprising number of clients rethinking their product selection, particularly as costs and charges transparency and regulatory audits make headlines.