After having discussed regulations on a more general level I am now getting into the nitty-gritty of what regulations actually look like. In order to avoid duplication—a lot of the regulation in this space is reasonably harmonised internationally, especially when looking at it from a slightly higher level—I had to choose a jurisdiction. Out of the two obvious choices—the United States and the European Union—I chose the EU. The reason for this is that I believe the EU regulatory framework is slightly cleaner in that responsibilities are more clearly assigned. In the US there is always the tension between state-level law and federal law, and there is also the issue of agencies with overlapping competences. In principle a similar tension exists in the EU between what is coming out of Brussels, and Member State law. In most areas of financial services, however, by now a fair amount of convergence has been achieved, in particular also because of the very powerful drive to ensure companies established in one Member State can passport their services into all other countries in the Single Market with minimal additional hurdles, so this body of law is a very good starting point to understand what a consistent and comprehensive set of financial services regulations looks like.

By necessity the summaries provided will omit a lot of the detail—after all I am summarising about 2,000 pages of regulations into a bit more than 100 pages. However, every piece of information given here is linked back to the article in the legislation where it comes from, and the entire European Union legislative body is available on the Internet, so anyone wanting to understand the details can go back and look at the actual legislation.

1. Alternative Investment Fund Manager Directive
2. Anti Money Laundering Directive
3. Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive
4. Cross-Border Payments Regulation
5. Consumer Contracts Directive
6. Consumer Credit Directive
7. Capital Requirements Directives
8. Deposit Guarantee Scheme Directive
9. Distance Marketing in Financial Services Directive
10. European Market Infrastructure Regulation
11. Electronic Money Directive
12. General Data Protection Regulation
13. Market Abuse Regulation
14. Mortgage Credit Directive
15. Markets in Financial Instruments Directive
16. Packaged Retail and Insurance-based Investment Products Regulation
17. Payments Services Directive
18. Rating Agencies Regulation
19. Undertakings for Collective Investment in Transferable Securities Directive
20. Unfair Commercial Practices Directive