MiFID II Fragmentation 2026: EU, UK, and Global Rules Explained

MiFID II’s Legacy: The Unbundling Era That Reshaped Corporate Access (2018-2023)

MiFID II’s research unbundling rules, in force since January 2018, forced European investment firms to pay for research and execution services separately rather than folding research costs into trading commissions. The aim, per the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s “Implementing MiFID II, Multi-firm Review of Research Unbundling Reforms,” was to improve accountability over costs passed to customers, sharpen price transparency, and reduce conflicts of interest by fully separating research-buying decisions from trade execution decisions.

For six years, that separation was the operating assumption behind every corporate access program in Europe. Sell-side teams priced roadshows and investor days as discrete line items. Buy-side compliance functions built research payment accounts (RPAs) to track spend against explicit budgets. IR departments learned to distinguish “paid access” from marketing contact, because the line mattered for their sell-side partners’ compliance obligations. MiFID II also built the underlying architecture still governing EU practice today, including Article 37 rules on access to trading, clearing, and settlement facilities and broader organizational requirements for investment firms, catalogued in ESMA’s Interactive Single Rulebook. That architecture didn’t disappear. What changed was the specific rule everyone had organized their commercial workflows around.

The Reversal: How the EU Listing Act Reopened the Door to Joint Payments

The EU Listing Act amends MiFID II’s investment research provisions (Article 24(9a)) to let firms choose joint payments for research and execution again, for issuers of any market capitalization, reversing the mandatory separation that defined the post-2018 regime. This is a policy reversal, not a technical footnote, and it directly affects how research and corporate access get budgeted and disclosed across the EU.

The path to that reversal ran through a formal, multi-stage process. ESMA published a Consultation Paper on Technical Advice covering the MiFID II Delegated Directive research provisions in October 2024, with comments accepted through January 28, 2025. The EU Securities and Markets Stakeholder Group adopted its advice on February 7, 2025. ESMA then issued its Final Report, “Technical Advice to the European Commission on Amendments to the Research Provisions of the MiFID II Delegated Directive in the Context of the Listing Act,” in April 2025, confirming that firms will be permitted to choose between joint or separate payments for research and execution, according to commentary from A&O Shearman/Shearman & Sterling. Every firm within scope of EU MiFID that purchases research is affected, per MUFG Investor Services’ Q2 2025 Regulatory Round-Up for Fund Managers. Choice, not mandate, is the new EU default; firms that prefer the old unbundled model can keep it.

The UK’s Parallel Path: FCA Re-Bundling and a Diverging Rulebook

The UK moved first. The FCA announced on April 10, 2024 an overhaul of UK research payment rules, restoring bundled payments as an option for the first time since 2017, alongside the existing unbundled RPA route, per MUFG Investor Services and Lexology’s April 2024 Monthly Regulatory Newsletter. The EU’s Listing Act followed roughly a year later, arriving at a similar destination through a separate legislative process with a separate timeline.

That gap matters operationally. AFME’s analysis, “MiFIR/MiFID II Reforms in the EU and the UK,” is explicit that EU and UK rules, while converging in direction, remain distinct regimes requiring separate policy treatment. A firm operating in both markets can’t assume one re-bundling policy satisfies both regulators; the enabling instruments, effective dates, and disclosure expectations differ even where the underlying philosophy now looks similar.

Fragmentation in Practice: What Global Teams Must Reconcile Between the EU and UK

Global corporate-access and IR teams now need two working assumptions instead of one. EU counterparties may operate under joint-payment arrangements confirmed in April 2025, while UK counterparties have had bundled options available since 2024 under a different legal instrument. Assuming EU and UK compliance frameworks are interchangeable risks misapplying disclosure or payment-tracking obligations across either border.

The sequence below shows how quickly this diverged and reconverged across two jurisdictions and multiple advisory bodies within roughly two years.

For teams running programs across both markets, the practical question isn’t “has unbundling ended?” It’s “which payment model applies to which counterparty, under which regime, and is that documented separately for EU and UK entities?” Treating this as one harmonized shift, rather than two related but distinct reforms, is the most common compliance blind spot heading into 2026.

2026’s Supervisory Spotlight: Conflicts of Interest and the Retail Investor Journey

ESMA announced in a December 2025 press release that it will launch a Common Supervisory Action with National Competent Authorities in 2026, focused on MiFID II conflicts-of-interest requirements in the distribution of financial instruments to retail clients, assessing how firms identify, prevent, and manage conflicts. Separately, ESMA’s March 2026 press release “ESMA Sets Out Actions to Simplify the Retail Investor Journey and Make Investing More Accessible” identifies three focus areas: streamlining disclosure requirements to tackle information overload, reducing complexity in suitability and appropriateness assessments, and simplifying MiFID II sustainability preference requirements for retail investors.

Neither action targets corporate access directly. Both create adjacent exposure. A CSA on conflicts of interest examines how firms manage situations where commercial relationships could influence which clients get access to information or opportunities, a category that plausibly extends to how research relationships intersect with investor-day invitations and analyst access. The retail investor journey work, particularly the sustainability preferences simplification, touches how ESG-themed events get communicated to retail-facing distributors.

Beyond Europe: IOSCO’s Global Agenda and the New Operational Layer (DORA, AI, Tokenization)

European rulemaking is only one axis of this fragmentation. IOSCO’s 2026 Workplan sets global priorities across three pillars, per IOSCO’s own publication: market effectiveness, protecting investors, and the evolving relationship between public and private markets. None of these pillars map neatly onto the EU/UK research-payment split, which means globally active teams are tracking a third, higher-level layer of standard-setting alongside two regional rulebooks.

Operational resilience has also become a distinct compliance track rather than a subset of research or disclosure rules. Bloomberg Professional Services’ June 2026 Global Regulatory Brief reports that the European Supervisory Authorities published their first annual overview of major ICT-related incidents reported under the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act, offering an initial assessment of operational resilience risk across the EU financial sector. The same brief notes regulatory attention extending to tokenization and AI supervision. For IR and corporate-access teams, this means the technology vendors and platforms used to run investor-access programs, scheduling systems, data rooms, virtual event infrastructure, are increasingly in scope for third-party risk assessments that sit outside MiFID II entirely.

What This Means for IR, Corporate Access, and Compliance Teams: A Practical Checklist

None of this converts into a single compliance requirement you can satisfy once and forget. It converts into an ongoing mapping exercise across jurisdictions, counterparties, and vendors, one that benefits from better documentation rather than a one-time policy update.

Start by confirming, entity by entity, whether your EU counterparties are operating under joint or separate payment terms following the April 2025 technical advice, and whether your UK counterparties have adopted the bundled option the FCA restored in 2024. Document that distinction explicitly rather than assuming a single global policy covers both. Second, review how your team records who attends investor days, analyst calls, and roadshows, and on what commercial basis, given that ESMA’s 2026 conflicts-of-interest CSA will examine exactly this kind of access-and-relationship documentation in participating jurisdictions. Third, if your program includes ESG or sustainability-themed investor events, revisit how those communications are framed for retail-facing audiences in light of ESMA’s March 2026 retail investor journey simplification work. Fourth, extend your vendor risk review beyond payment and disclosure rules to the operational resilience obligations now surfacing under DORA reporting, particularly for any platform handling investor data or event logistics. This is a discussion checklist to raise with your compliance function, not a substitute for its judgment or a guarantee of conformity with any specific regime.

The common thread across all four items is documentation quality. Programs that can produce a clear, timestamped record of who was invited to what, under which payment arrangement, and through which commercial relationship are simply easier to defend when a regulator asks. That’s an operational problem, not a legal one, and it’s the one global IR and corporate-access teams can actually solve now, ahead of whatever the next jurisdiction-specific rule turns out to be.