After years of hard work across the industry, the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) finally landed on January 3, 2018. With so much time and money invested in achieving compliance with the new regime, there was understandably apprehension about the go-live process. The sheer number of concurrent systems changes sparked fears of a Y2K 'millennium bug' scenario, which would see computers and programs failing, unable to cope with these new demands.
But much like Y2K, fears of the world coming to an end – or at least liquidity disappearing from markets – were unfounded. Beyond some widely anticipated challenges around data and vendor solutions, MiFID II got off to a relatively pain-free beginning.