LONDON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Credit rating agencies
should have their market share capped in the European Union to
promote more competition in a sector dominated by the “Big
Three”, a report from an EU member of parliament said.

The big rating agencies such as Moody’s Investors Service
, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings
should not be allowed to have more than a quarter of the market
for ratings in banks, insurers, companies or structured finance
products, the report said.

LONDON, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Banks are looking to break
into the last bastion of Europe’s securities market, the
settling of trades, to meet growing pressure from regulators for
safer trading backed with collateral.

Bank of New York Mellon and other lenders may bypass
Euroclear and Clearstream to build their own
settlement houses, several industry officials said. Settlement
is whereby legal ownership of a security is swapped for cash.

LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) – Italy’s stock exchange
rules for smaller companies will be relaxed within months in a
bid to persuade swathes of family-owned firms to list and help
boost a struggling economy.

Giuseppe Vegas, head of Italy’s market regulator Consob,
said family firms will need capital to grow but find it
difficult to obtain funding from banks who are required to build
up their capital buffers over coming years.

LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Policymakers from the
world’s top economies meet this weekend in Mexico City to begin
finding common ground to tackle the world’s economic challenges,
which include reining in a $60 trillion financial sector on the
fringe of mainstream banking.

Leaders of the Group of 20 asked their task force, the
Financial Stability Board (FSB), to come up with plans to
regulate “shadow banks” like hedge funds, money market funds,
repurchase agreements and securities lending.

LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) – Gibraltar will scrap a key
curb on its funds industry as the minnow British territory tries
to take on Ireland, Luxembourg and rivals further afield to
become an international financial services hub.

Under current rules a fund and its administrator must be
based in the same place, a major burden on funds looking to use
the territory as a gateway to investors across the 27-nation
European Union which it joined with Britain.

LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) – A senior U.S. regulator was
“optimistic” on Monday about finding a framework for the world’s
top economy to use global book keeping rules for investors to
compare cross-border companies.

“We are hopeful we can put forward a model,” James Kroeker,
chief accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
(SEC), told Reuters.

LONDON, Feb 16 (Reuters) – The European Union’s tax
chief on Thursday rejected UK opposition to a planned levy on
financial transactions, saying it would dampen risky trading and
barely dent growth.

EU Tax Commissioner Algirdas Semeta drew scorn from Britsh
lawmakers when he said a bloc-wide financial transaction tax
would cut economic growth by a “negligible” 0.01 percent
annually and raise 10 billion euros for a cash-strapped UK
treasury.

LONDON, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Financial operators on the
fringes of the traditional bank system could be made to hold
more capital and mainstream banks forced to limit exposure to
risk in the $60 trillion shadow banking sector, a draft EU paper
showed.

In the draft consultation document obtained by Reuters, the
bloc’s executive European Commission said shadow banking,
including money market funds, exchange-traded funds, repurchase
agreements and securities lending, could play a “potentially
useful” role.

LONDON, Feb 15 (Reuters) – The Financial Services
Authority’s top enforcer Margaret Cole steps down in March after
nearly seven years at the UK watchdog where she raised industry
hackles by radically altering how market abusers are pursued.

Cole joined the FSA in 2005 and beefed up enforcement by
issuing record fines and targetting top names in the industry,
slapping a 7.2 million pound penalty on U.S. hedge fund star
David Einhorn and his Greenlight Capital fund last month.

BRUSSELS/ LONDON, Feb 14 (Reuters) – European Union
countries may be asked next month to back an EU tax on financial
transactions or to block it, a move by finance ministers that
could clear the way for a smaller group of countries to
introduce a levy themselves.

The British government has promised to stop any such
pan-European tax, fearing it would damage the City of London,
and the European Central Bank has warned that a transactions tax
is impractical if introduced in Europe alone.