On April 15, the European Securities and Markets Authority (“ESMA”) published a paper on stakeholder engagement in peer reviews.

The paper sets out six high-level principles guiding the interaction with stakeholders with the objective of obtaining background information relevant for the peer review:

• What entities are considered as stakeholders in the context of a peer review?
• Who decides if interaction with stakeholders is needed?
• When does this decision need to be taken? Must national competent authorities (“NCAs“) accept the fact of stakeholder engagement?
• If an NCA may decline such a possibility, does an NCA need to explain why it would not want to have stakeholder engagement for a particular peer review?
• How is the interaction organized and how are the stakeholders chosen?
• What use is made of the outcome of the stakeholder interaction?

The principles contribute to ESMA’s commitment to focus on supervisory convergence in 2016. ESMA may in the future, in light of its experience, prepare a set of procedures for stakeholder engagement in peer reviews, which could be annexed to the Methodology for peer reviews (ESMA/20131709). Paper.