MiFID: not quite the end of the beginning

‘Start now or it may be too late’ was the consistent message to delegates to City and Financial’s “Preparing for the implementation of MiFID in the UK” conference on 30 November. Philip Warland of PricewaterhouseCoopers encapsulated the scale of the task in a quote from a continental bank: “Unlike most other projects, MiFID covers virtually every area within the organisation. Trading, research, IT, operations, marketing, compliance, risk, audit, custody and legal affairs will be impacted, in many cases severely. It is considerably bigger than either Basel II or IFRS.”