Response to the ESMA Discussion Paper on Benchmarks Regulation

FESE supports efficient, fair, orderly and transparent financial markets that meet the needs of well protected and informed investors and provide a source for companies to raise capital and for investors to hedge their portfolios.

As such, exchanges can be regarded as neutral providers of data, and in certain cases also indices, but without any conflict of interest between trading activity leading to beneficial ownership and the provision of data and/or the provision of indices and benchmarks. FESE supports working with ESMA to construct a workable regime for benchmarks provided by trading venues.