MiFID II: perimeter, licensing, exemptions

MiFID II questions answered at decision level: whether an activity needs a licence, which exemption genuinely holds, and what the compliant operating model costs — before the business is built, not after.

Scope

Perimeter analysis. Whether what you do — or plan to do — constitutes an investment service in relation to financial instruments, instrument by instrument and service by service. This boundary also decides the MiCA question: instruments qualifying as financial instruments under MiFID II fall outside MiCA into the securities regime, which since the end of the CASP transition is often the route that keeps an institutional product alive (see the MiCA note).

Licensing strategy and exemptions. Where the perimeter is crossed: the realistic authorisation route before the CSSF, or the honest assessment of the exemptions — group, ancillary, own-account — including where regulator practice reads them more narrowly than the text.

Product governance and cross-border services. Target-market and distribution arrangements sized for the firm, and the cross-border analysis for services into or out of Luxembourg — passporting, reverse solicitation as it is actually policed, and third-country questions.

Where it connects

MiFID work sits beside Prospectus Regulation and Euro MTF questions on the issuance side, tokenisation on the instrument-qualification side, and compliance for the framework that keeps the licence. For a perimeter question, write first: contact@viekey.eu.