ESMA review letter to the EU Commission on AIFMD

The ESMA and EU national competent authorities have identified areas of improvement to AIFMD. The review provides the base for their recommendations to be enacted.

The key changes proposed by ESMA in the letter include:

• harmonisation of the AIFMD and the Undertaking Collective Investments in Transferable Securities (UCITS) regimes (The key difference e.g. diverging requirements for risk management reporting should be addressed.)
• clarification of permissible business activities, legal uncertainties and consistency in UCITS Directive, AIFMD & MiFID, e.g. whether real estate qualify as financial instrument.
• clarification of several definitions, e.g. professional investor, semi-professional investor, alternative investment fund (AIF), reverse solicitation, significant influence.
• increase of digitalised communication.
• provision of additional Liquidity Management Tools (LMTs).
• extension of AIFMD supervision to sub-threshold Alternative Investment Fund Managers (AIFMs)

The key changes proposed by ESMA related to regulatory reporting are:

• amendment of leverage calculation methodologies
• requirement of Legal Entity Identity (LEI, ISO 17442) for all AIFMs and their AIFs to cross-analyse data between several reporting regimes (EMIR, SFTR, MiFIR)
• completeness of assets and liabilities (holdings)
• removal of duplicative information and request data in their operational data structure
• incorporation of various metrics regarding environmental, social and governmental (ESG) aspects into mandatory reporting

The full length of the letter is available here – https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-recommends-priority-topics-in-aifmd-review