Only a third of the private banks have actively started analysing the impacts and the raft of implications of MiFIDII, according to PwC.
MiFIDII, one of the upcoming financial markets directives, is expected to generate another big wave of ‘inflectional reconstruction’ for private banks, but less than half of the industry is actually ‘in the fore front of it’, warns Ian Woodhouse, director of private banking and wealth management at PwC.
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"I think the absolute worst thing a bank can do is put its head in the sand over MiFIDII and say it is too far away because it is going to move quite fast," he told PBI.
MiFIDII is going to increase the quality of investor protection at all levels, as well as the quality in the advisory models with heavy impacts on clients’ categorisation in both retail and private banking industries. The legislation will come into force in 2017.
Though ‘the broad direction of travel’ of MiFIDII is clear, Woodhouse said many players will still ‘wait and see’ before assessing and modelling MiFIDII impacts.
"Private banks are going to move to a more institutional levels of asset management quality research, they are going to better educate the clients, and they have got to demonstrate added value about return versus risk. That means they’ll require a certain set of skills that they had in the past," he concluded.
