Introduction / Financial Institutions
Financial institutions play an important role in the financial system by providing a variety of financial services, including deposit and lending, securities trading, investment advice, insurance and payment processing. By complying with the EU FiDA Regulation, financial institutions help to strengthen consumer confidence in the financial sector and ensure the stability of financial markets.
Financial institutions within the meaning of the FiDA regulation
The term “financial institutions” in the FiDA draft covers various types of companies, including banks, payment service providers, securities firms, investment companies and insurance companies, as well as their intermediaries. This includes virtually all areas of the financial industry.
Since this Regulation aims to require financial institutions to grant access to certain categories of data upon request of the customer when acting as data holders and to enable the exchange of data on the basis of the authorisation granted by the customer when acting as data users, this Regulation should contain a list of financial institutions that may act either as data holders, as data users or as both. Financial institutions should therefore be understood as entities that offer financial products and services or provide relevant information services to customers in the financial sector
Listing according to Art.2 of FiDA
According to Article 2, ‘financial institutions’ means the following entities:
(a) credit institutions;
(b) payment institutions, including account information service providers and payment institutions exempted pursuant to Directive (EU) 2015/2366;
(d) investment firms;
(e) crypto-asset service providers;
(f) issuers of asset-referenced tokens;
(g) managers of alternative investment funds;
(h) management companies of undertakings for collective investment in transferable securities
(i) insurance and reinsurance undertakings;
(j) insurance intermediaries and ancillary insurance intermediaries;
(k) institutions for occupational retirement provision;
(l) credit rating agencies;
(m) crowdfunding service providers;
(n) PEPP providers;
For the purposes of the FiDA Regulation, the above-mentioned financial institutions can be either data holders or data users or both.
Exceptions
In order to ensure proportionality, certain financial institutions fall outside the scope of this Regulation for reasons related to their size or the services they provide which would make compliance with this Regulation too difficult.
These include institutions for occupational retirement provision which operate pension schemes with a total of no more than 15 members, as well as insurance intermediaries which are micro, small or medium-sized enterprises.
They are the following:
a) |
Alternative investment fund managers within the meaning of Article 3(2) of Directive 2011/61/EU; |
b) |
Insurance and reinsurance undertakings within the meaning of Article 4 of Directive 2009/138/EC; |
c) |
Institutions for occupational retirement provision that operate pension schemes with a total of fewer than 15 members; |
d) |
natural or legal persons exempted pursuant to Articles 2 and 3 of Directive 2014/65/EU; |
e) |
Insurance intermediaries, reinsurance intermediaries and ancillary insurance intermediaries which are micro, small or medium-sized enterprises; |