2018-03-01
Planned regulation changes – to improve business environment and strengthen investor protection
The Bank of Lithuania publishes a list of legal acts and recommendations to be prepared this year. On this list – legislative initiatives for reducing excess regulation, lifting other administrative barriers and strengthening investor protection.
‘Last year we surveyed financial market participants and other stakeholders to find out what requirements, in their view, are excessive, impede activities, what should be changed and how. We got well-grounded suggestions, particularly in the fields of collective investment undertakings and pension accumulation activity. We took them into consideration in planning future legal changes,’ said Vytautas Valvonis, Executive Director of the Supervision Service at the Bank of Lithuania.
In addition to solutions for the improvement of business environment, this year the Bank of Lithuania will further block illegal provision of insurance and financial services, especially investment ones, and will seek to ensure that sophisticated services unfit for retail clients are not available to them at all.
In 2018, the Bank of Lithuania will also prepare legal acts necessary for the implementation of European Union directives and recommendations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. To further strengthen the credit union sector, it will be proposed to change liquidity risk management and security investment regulation.
The Bank of Lithuania aims at creating an advanced, attractive and competitive regulatory and supervisory environment for the domestic financial sector and carries out a permanent review of issued legal acts, guidelines and recommendations for financial market participants. The purpose of such a review is to identify and eliminate excessive regulatory requirements, ensure the relevance of requirements and their suitability for current market conditions, and take into account developments in the economic, social and technological environment.
The right for the Bank of Lithuania to issue legal acts and recommendations on the activities and supervision of financial market participants subject to supervision in carrying out financial market supervision is provided for in the Law on the Bank of Lithuania. Prepared draft legal acts and recommendations are consulted with supervised financial market participants.
The list of legal acts to be prepared in 2018 is available here.