Investor protection and regulation: what changed

This section covers the rules that govern how investment products are sold, priced and disclosed. For a long-term investor these rarely require any action, but they determine what the market offers and at what cost.

The European baseline was set by MiFID II in January 2018, which brought cost transparency, inducement limits and product governance, and was implemented in Austria through the WAG 2018. PRIIPs completed it: the standardised Key Information Document became mandatory for UCITS funds in January 2023. Switzerland followed with FIDLEG and FINIG in January 2020, adopting comparable client segmentation and suitability rules outside the EU framework.

The most concrete recent change is the ban on payment for order flow under the MiFIR review, in force since March 2024 and fully effective in Germany from July 2026. It removes the revenue model that financed near-free trading at neobrokers, and the question for investors is now whether cost reappears as wider spreads rather than as explicit fees.

Two other strands are worth noting. Consolidation of supervision — Canada merged IIROC and the MFDA into CIRO in January 2023 — tends to precede tougher conduct rules. And attempts to impose a fiduciary standard on US retirement advisers have failed twice: the 2016 DOL Fiduciary Rule was vacated in 2018, and the Retirement Security Rule of April 2024 was stayed and vacated in turn. Where a fiduciary duty does not apply, the burden of checking incentives stays with the investor.