Who is sorting out MiFID for financial institutions in London ?

I have been looking through roles posted by contract agencies in the two main job boards, jobserve (mostly IT role) and efinancialcareers.com . The picture they paint is interesting and worrying at the same time.

Some recent posting are looking for roles of Business Analyst or Project Manager for best execution and transaction reporting and conclude with variations on the theme of ‘knowledge of MiFID advantageous but not essential’.

MiFID is 60% process and procedures and 40% IT implementation. Unless all the process and procedures have been sorted (and if that is the case why looking for an interim Business Analyst) you actually need to know about MiFID to understand what is important or not in a best execution policy

MiFID changes the emphasis of best execution and the essentials ‘bookends’ for best execution are the preliminary guidelines, the choice of trading venue and the relevant provision of market data at one end and the trading reports on the other. Anything else is just… execution. You need to know the impact on the front office system of the new reality for market data (and therefore have an appreciation of the changes brought in by MiFID and therefore know MiFID), how to present information on quotes, liquidity and costs in an environment where there could be more than one trading venue for any given security and you need to know the impact of suitability and appropriateness, conflict of interest and client classification on the relationship between a trader and his/her clients. On the other side you need to know the fields in the transaction reports and the rules for the latency between execution and reporting. You need to make an assessment on reference data, etc. all things tied to MiFID.

Implementation of MiFID is full of things that are not completely clarified, others have been clarified in a way that cannot be immediately processed by the City. Recruiting professionals that are expected to learn MiFID on the job contributes to the confusion.