The Right of Access to Clearing & Settlement Systems Under EU Law

This chapter aims at tracking the evolution of access rights to clearing and settlement systems within European financial markets and analyse the content and the function of these access rights under the perspective of modern European Financial Regulation and especially MiFID. Specifically, it focuses on the integration of these rights into the framework of general access to regulated markets, free circulation of capitals and the establishment of a secure, efficient and consolidated European securities market.The chapter about the access to clearing and settlement systems and the community law rights that are related to it is structured as following. Firstly, we examine the way for determining the operation of a regulated market in relation to the Community rights of investment firms for access to it. Second, we analyse clearing and settlement as procedures necessary for the fulfillment of a safe and efficient environment of transactions in the regulated market, under a MiFID perspective. Third, we examine access rights to a clearing system as concomitant rights of the access in a regulated market and we present the operation of a regulated market firstly concerning the Community Law right for the use of central counterparty, clearing and settlement arrangements of another Member State than its home Member State and secondly concerning the Community Law right of investment firms for selecting clearing systems of a Member State other than the one that the regulated market is connected to by default. This second stage is analyzed in two sub-chapters, one regarding the access to clearing systems and the other regarding the access to and use of settlement systems. Moreover, we refer to the technical and connection requirements, the fulfillment of which is necessary for the implementation of the access rights and we finally present a paradigm of interconnected markets and systems, aiming at presenting the issues emerging from the function of these access rights, under the scope of MiFID and the restructuring of European cross-border transactions after this recent evolution