ESAs advise on Packaged Retail and Insurance-Based Investment Products with environmental or social objectives

The European Supervisory Authorities (ESAs) submitted today their Technical Advice to the European Commission to set minimum requirements, which manufacturers of packaged retail and insurance-based investment products with environmental or social objectives (EOS PRIIPs) should comply with to ensure that they offer products that meet the retail investors' needs.
The manufacturer of an EOS PRIIP is required to install specific governance measures to ensure that environmental or social objectives of the product are met on an ongoing basis. Furthermore, the product has to demonstrate to retail investors throughout the investment process the relevance of these objectives. In its Advice, the ESAs addressed four areas with regard to PRIIPs with environmental or social objectives and included the following recommendations:
•    The PRIIP manufacturer targeting environmental or social objectives has to clearly specify these objectives, together with an appropriate and proportionate strategy on how to achieve them.
•    The PRIIP manufacturer should disclose to the retail investors the objectives and how these will be achieved.
•    The PRIIP manufacturer has to install and well document governance and monitoring measures, where the latter need to be proportionate to the objectives and strategy how to achieve the objectives.
•    The PRIIP manufacturer should conduct regular reviews on the progress made in achieving the specified and disclosed objectives.

Acknowledging the cross-sectorial dimension and the need for the rigorous assessment to address potential gaps, the ESAs specified, for each of these four areas, the required regulatory outcome and an assessment of existing rules.
The ESAs concluded that at this time the establishment of specific and detailed standalone obligations for PRIIPs targeting specific environmental or social objectives would not be proportionate. Existing sectoral measures offer already, or are already in the process of putting in place, a sufficiently stringent and flexible basis for the sound regulation of PRIIPs targeting environmental and social objectives.
The Technical Advice can be viewed here

Background

Packaged retail investment and insurance products (PRIIPs) cover the range of investment products marketed to retail investors, in the European Union a market worth up to €10 trillion. They include structured products, whatever their underlying legal form and including structured deposits, insurance-based investments (including unit-linked and with-profit products), and all kinds of investment funds.