Implementation of obligations resulting from the transposition of the European Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)
The Group’s various entities affected by MiFID worked diligently throughout 2009 on the obligations resulting from the transposition of the directive.
MiFID has led to changes in many areas, namely the structure of the financial markets, the organisational rules applying to Investment Service Providers (hereafter ISPs) and the rules of good conduct that ISPs must follow in their customer relations. Within Société Générale, the principle changes are as follows :
- Client ranking systems have been introduced to determine an appropriate degree of protection (higher protection for non-professional clients and lower protection for professional clients). Each client is informed of their designated category and of the fact that they may ask to change category,
- Client evaluation procedures have been adopted by the business lines that provide investment services. Through these procedures, sales teams are able to gather certain information about their clients’ personal situations before providing them with investment services,
- Execution policies have been defined by the Société Générale Group entities concerned, which are required to bring these policies to the attention of their clients and to keep them up to date,
- Policies have been drafted for the identification, prevention and management of conflicts of interest.