What Is Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), And Why Is It Important For Every Listed Issuer?
In this article we discuss issuers core responsibilities in preventing market abuse, demonstrating how EQ can help your organisation to stay compliant.
What is MAR and why should I be interested?
MAR is a key set of UK and EQ regulations that affect every listed issuer, providing a regulatory framework that aims to prevent market abuse and protect the integrity of UK and EU financial markets. Fines for breaching MAR obligations can be as much as €15m (or 15% of revenue) for companies, and €5m for individuals.
What are my key MAR obligations as a listed issuer?
One of the key issuer obligations, defined by Article 18 (of the Market Abuse Regulation), is to produce and maintain insider lists. Insider lists are an asset in helping issuers and individuals to control the flow of inside information across the organisation and for managing their confidentiality duties and for competent authorities in investigating market abuse.
Article 18 defines that issuers must:
- Compile a list of all insiders who work for them under contract or otherwise have access to inside information.
- Maintain lists with deal-specific or event-based sections and can also have an optional permanent insider section.
- Include all content specified by MAR and be drawn up using the prescribed template.
- Take all reasonable steps to ensure insiders acknowledge their duties in writing.
- Maintain lists in electronic form and update them immediately.
- Promptly disclose an insider list to the relevant National Competent Authority upon request,
- Keep lists for at least five years after they are created or amended.
How can EQ help?
EQ and InsiderList have recently announced their landmark partnership to bring advanced compliance automation to EQ's extensive client base. The ‘EQ Insider’ solution significantly enhances how listed companies manage their MAR compliance obligations.
Ease the burden of MAR compliance obligations with EQ Insider MAR compliance service. Our secure online MAR insider list software delivers all of your requirements via one simple solution.
How can EQ Insider benefit you?
If you still rely on email, Word, or Excel to complete your MAR compliance obligations you could be wasting valuable time and cost in managing manual and labour-intensive compliance processes and be creating a significant risk for potential error through lack of oversight, control, or accountability.
With EQ Insider you can manage all your MAR compliance requirements via one simple solution, from project and permanent insider lists to confidential lists and PDMR/PCA obligations enjoying key benefits such as:
- Saving time and effort - issuers who use our digital workflow solution to automate their list management process save approximately 94% of their time managing MAR.
- Improving user experience - our 360 dashboard gives you visibility into the entire compliance workflow, automating everything from creating MAR compliant lists to recording digital signatures.
- Avoiding fines and reputational damage - deploy a secure and robust compliance platform that assists in avoiding personal and professional fines of up to €15 million, or 15% of annual turnover.
- Helping you sleep more easily at night - EQ Insider employs sophisticated real-time data validation, intelligent data capture, and rules-based processing to ensure that all data is tested for quality and integrity, and that it is stored in a MAR-compliant format.
Even better, under the terms of our partnership most existing EQ UKSS clients can access EQ Insider at a competitive market rate and start using the service in as little as 48 hours.
Our commitment to delivering best-in-class solutions
We are not stopping there, one of the key factors InsiderList stood out as the clear market leader was their ability to integrate EQ Insider into our core products. With exploration and design already underway we look forward to delivering EQ clients the best end-to-end MAR solution in the market.