Upcoming regulatory projects in the European Union aiming to facilitate the development of a single market for financial services will have a major impact on the rest of the world over the next several years.
The example of European codes on unit trusts - Ucits - is useful. The EU updated its standards for allowing Europe-wide marketing of mutual funds. Asian governments have been forced to accommodate these changes - and when individual European governments indicated they would insist on following the new version of Ucits as early as mid-2005, it left Asian regulators scrambling to keep pace.
Now Asian regulators and industry practitioners need to keep...
