IIROC releases 3-year plan

IIROC has published its three-year Strategic Plan, detailing how it plans to protect investors and support healthy capital markets while addressing the many changes affecting the investment industry and Canadian investors. As part of this Plan, IIROC is also publishing its priorities for the first year.

During the past year, IIROC carried out an extensive stakeholder consultation process that identified a number of trends that IIROC should address in its plan for the future, including:

• rapid technological change;
• a shifting regulatory and legislative landscape;
• the need for coordination and cooperation with all jurisdictions to deliver effective and efficient securities regulation;
• changing investor demographics and the resulting changes in their behavioural and investment preferences; and
• continuing decline in retail investor ownership of individual securities.

The plan outlines how IIROC’s role should evolve over time to reflect this changing environment and achieve its long-term vision, which is to: inspire confidence and deter wrongdoing; deliver efficient regulation; be a trusted, respected, valued partner to its stakeholders and a leading-edge regulator, while attracting and retaining high quality employees who can enable IIROC to deliver on its goals.

The plan outlines IIROC’s strategies to achieve this vision, including:

• enhancing market supervision by using leading-edge technology for real-time and post-trade surveillance;
• enhancing business conduct and prudential regulation in a risk-based approach that anticipates trends, recognizes different business models and protects investors;
• strengthening enforcement by pursuing legislative changes to more effectively collect fines and hold wrongdoers accountable;
• improving the way IIROC develops and consults with all stakeholders, particularly investors, on policy to ensure timely, relevant and proportionate regulation; and
• sharing information with IIROC’s regulatory partners, market participants and the public, for example by providing access to corporate debt trading information.

To help accomplish these goals, IIROC plans to invest in people and technology, increase investor awareness of the protections and benefits of its regulation and deliver greater value to the Canadian regulatory system.

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