 Good morning, everybody. Delighted to have such a great crowd here this morning. My name is Barry Andrews. I'm the Director General of the Institute of International European Affairs. We are delighted to welcome Marina Ross here today. This is the second of the three supervisory authorities to come to the IAEA. We had Adam Farkas in the IAEA in May. I was selling Marina a much smaller crowd, which is pleased to hear. And we will also have Gabriel Bernardino of the IOPPA in February in the Institute. So this is part of the work that we're doing on the future of Europe generally, but also, of course, what we're doing on Brexit. So we have quite a full schedule, and we look forward to seeing you at many Institute events in the future. So it just falls to me to thank the Central Bank for providing us with this space, this wonderful space for this morning's discussion. And so I'll hand over to Dervil Roland, who will make some introductory remarks. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. You're all very welcome. I'll try and keep it brief. I was at an Oroctus Committee hearing yesterday, so I think I have used most of what I had yesterday. So not so much back recharged this morning. I just want to welcome all of you and the IAEA here this morning, and especially I want to welcome Marina to Dublin. And I'm very much looking forward to hearing what she has to share with us this morning. And we recognize here in the Central Bank that the IAEA make a very significant contribution to the debate on and the evaluation of the European project, its successes, its challenges, and the future direction. And of course, here in the Central Bank of Ireland, Europe is in our DNA. It's how we participate. It's part of our regulatory influence. It's very important to us to be really embedded in the European project. And as we look forward to our own agenda to 2019 and beyond, some of our key priorities are to bear in mind the background of the fundamental regulatory overhaul that has occurred in the last decade. And I know if any of you were watching the media and television in recent times, there's been a huge focus on 10 years since the bailout and since the crisis and the devastating impact it had on all of us in this jurisdiction. We won't forget that in Ireland, I think in particular in a hurry. So we have very much welcomed the European reforms to make our financial system more stable. So our key focus for 2019 and beyond is to continue the effort to focus on resilience in the financial system, and so that it can better withstand external shocks and any future crisis were in better shape. And you often hear the phrase, you repair the roof while the sun is shining. And that certainly is a key strategic aim for us to be significant participants in that objective. And of course with Brexit looming and much debate about how that will land, that too is a key focus for us to mitigate any potential risks to our economy, our financial system, and of course our consumers. And particularly an objective close to my heart is that we want to ensure that we build on the sustained regulatory improvements that have been made over the last decade. And in particular our focus on financial conduct regulation and to ensure all of the firms that we regulate have a fully articulated, fully embedded conduct risk framework that truly delivers for investors and consumers and that our markets are fair, efficient, transparent and effective. And so I think that it's fair to say that we perceive we will be busy in the future with lots more work to do to safeguard stability and protect consumers. But all of that has got to be delivered in a way that we will participate effectively in the European conversations and internationally so that we can participate in discussions, decision-making and influence those because our relationships in Europe are mission-critical to us here in the Central Bank. And we are part of a lot of those very significant European institutions. Of course the European Central Bank, the single supervisory mechanism, the European Systemic Risk Board and of course the ECES. We have the EBA, EOPA and ESMA. And I'm privileged to sit on the Board of Supervisors in ESMA and so I'm very delighted that Verena is here today. I've only had that position for a year and in my time I have been impressed at awestruck times if I tell you the truth about the sheer breadth and depth of the agenda that faces ESMA at the supervisory board. The breadth that ESMA covers is astonishing. It ranges from securitisation, investor protection through to some of the big significant jobs that are going through at the moment. You have MIFID, EMIR and of course the funds industry which is very significant here and the focus on usage. All of that is dealt with in a very busy agenda and a very wide breadth. And I know that Verena's skill and diligence and driving the enhanced focus on a European landscape is very important to the effectiveness of ESMA and particularly her focus on supervisory convergence and their objectives that are shared by the Central Bank. Our funds industry is of international significance and growing and the international banking and investment firm sector are both growing in scale and complexity in this jurisdiction in large parts of Brexit and beyond. There's similar trends in the insurance industry both in our domestic market and with an international focus and therefore we have a responsibility to consider the broader impacts of that on the wider financial system at a European level as well as local to be in lockstep with our European peers and from my perspective I feel that that's really important then that we are active and engaged citizens in Europe and they're hinged for me in two fundamental reasons. The first is that we contribute effectively to the development of a high quality and purposeful legislation and the development of that because we bring that home to enact it here in Ireland and we get the benefit of that. So it's very important that we make sure that the frameworks that we have suit us and are of the quality that we need so that we are resilient and sustainable system and the second one is that you must be an influential voice in that in which you participate. So if we are going to implement this we want to be in lockstep with others having the best practice in regulation of financial conduct markets right across Europe. So in that context I reference our alignment and strong support to the European convergence agenda in ESMA and it's all about right across Europe achieving effectiveness and that's really important that we have common rules but also that we have common supervisory standards in pursuit of the aims and objectives of the regulatory framework. So we have that level playing field for all. So we welcome Verena today and this is a pivotal moment in fact for ESMA it faces very significant challenges that are being ably dealt with in the face of Brexit and all the work and uncertainty that that brings with it and of course the ESAs themselves face a challenge with the European proposals at the moment about the agenda for change and the changing nature of their roles in the future and I very much look forward to hearing from Verena perhaps on her observations on some of that and many other things but particularly with the view to our shared goals of safeguarding stability of the financial system enhancing the protection of consumers and promoting the stability and ordinariness of the financial markets. Thank you. Thank you for that and thanks for hosting us today. Thank you Verena for coming over. We look forward to your talk. Let me just introduce Verena briefly at German National and economists by background. Verena has worked for the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority in the UK. You've been executive director at Ismay almost since the beginning just a couple of months so you're well settled in there. Ismay as you know one of those three institutions that we mentioned set up in the immediate aftermath or in the close aftermath of the financial crisis to plug many of the problems and deficits that were that existed in terms of financial regulation after the financial crisis. Verena is going to speak for about 20 minutes that's on the record and then we have a Q&A session which is off the record under Chatham House rule. We've plenty of time for that. We'll wrap up on the dots of 8.15. So without further ado, can I give you the floor? Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. And I think I will stay here actually if that's okay with everyone. It's slightly less formal than standing behind the lectern. And but first of all, I want to thank very much Barry and Dervil and Dan for the introductory remarks. I'm very, very pleased to be here and want to thank the Institute of International Economic European Affairs for the invitation. Great pleasure to be here and it's nice to hear as well that I'm one of the three. I mean, after all, we work very closely together with our sisters and brothers in the EBA and EOPA and particularly on the topic I want to talk a bit about today, Brexit. Clearly, this is something which is not just the securities markets topic but it's actually a topic that cuts across all the sectors and being here in the Central Bank of Ireland as a single regulator, I think that's even more important to emphasize. Thank you to Dervil also for making the kind of broader explanation of what the work of ESMA is about. I decided for today to, of course, base my remarks around Brexit and the asset management industry on our overall mandate, ensuring financial stability, orderly markets and investor protection. That's also the key drivers for how we look at this topic of Brexit. But in terms of the talk today, I want to focus on two areas in particular, supervisory, convergence, and possible cliff edge effects and how we kind of look at that and deal with that. And both of them I want to look at particularly in the focus of the asset management industry, knowing how important that is here in Ireland. In terms of supervisory, convergence, with the decision that the UK is going to leave the EU and as stated by the UK government as well, leaving the single market has led to a situation where quite a few entities are thinking about shifting their business from the UK into the EU 27. And that has really been the reason for us to start last year with trying to reiterate what the core requirements in all of Europe are about minimum requirements around authorization, supervision, what do entities have to have when they actually establish themselves in the European Union. And we did that through one general opinion and three specific opinions focusing on investment firms, asset management and secondary markets. A key area tackled in those opinions was outsourcing and delegation to third countries. What our opinions are seeking to address is the risk of letterbox entities. This is the need to have real substance in the country where you're authorized. The EU regulations of investment funds explicitly require there to be enough substance in the entity established in the home member state. For the asset management industry, our opinion clarified that this means in practice and what this means in practice and what factors have to be taken into account when assessing whether there is sufficient substance. Guidance is based on existing legislation and particularly on the AFMD which actually has some quite detailed requirements around what you need to have in place to be able to then delegate and outsource your business. We consider as well the need to step up from just putting that down on paper in a way and agreeing it around the board as the substance of how we want to authorize and supervise by making it live even more. And with that, we established the so-called supervisory coordination network which is there as a forum for reporting and discussing amongst the national supervisors the concrete authorization and supervision cases related to market participants that are shifting their business from the UK into the EU 27. And the aim of the forum is to promote consistency of decision-making by competent authorities and the SCN therefore brings together senior experts from a broad range of competent authorities who table actual cases that they are currently facing involving UK companies looking to move to the EU 27. And all this information is provided on an anonymous basis so it's very much, it's sharing the kind of actual experience and the challenges that we are each facing but trying to take it away from, you know, trying to make it as open a discussion as possible and keeping the detailed supervisory information anonymous. And the Central Bank of Ireland is playing a big part in that. Michael is here in the audience as the member of that group. And I think from my experience of sharing that group what we can really see is that while it retains the full responsibility for the authorization decision and for the discussions with the firm at the national level it is allowing people to ask questions to provide input and I think it gives the national supervisor a greater platform to then talk to the individual firm and say actually looking at this we think you need to strengthen this part of your application or we believe you need to adjust here or there. And so in the end it remains the national decision whether to authorize a firm or not but it takes into account the common view of what the type of challenges are that we are facing when we see this type of movement of entities from one jurisdiction to another. We've already discussed a number of different cases since the network was set up in 2017 and we are clearly seeing now that there is a pickup in the interest not just from the big firms but also from some of the smaller and medium sized firms that maybe didn't really focus on their Brexit planning to the same extent. But we are well prepared to tackle that I think with the experience that we've had so far in talking about our individual supervisory challenges. Let me move on from supervisory convergence and this is just a very narrow kind of focus of supervisory convergence. Dervil was talking about other areas where we talk about supervisory convergence but this is the supervisory convergence challenge that we face in the Brexit context of actually making sure as EU 27 there is no regulatory arbitrage. Of course there will always be consideration of firms do I go to Ireland, do I go to Amsterdam, do I go to Frankfurt, do I go to Paris? But that competition and that consideration of where do I go should not be based on the fact that there's regulatory arbitrage behind it. There might be tax consideration, there might be efficiency consideration, there might be local language considerations but it should not be on the basis of the regulatory regime moving down to the lowest common denominator. Let me move on to cliff edge effects in our work there. We have undertaken work on the impact of cliff edge effects across the different sectors in our remit in the context of Brexit, including amongst others, not surprisingly the asset management industry. Under worst case scenario where there's no transitional agreement in place, the current EU regulatory framework for the asset management industry would stop applying to UK funds as of the end of March next year and the regulation that would be affected by that are effectively the alternative asset management and investment funds management directives and the usage directives but also MIFI2 which is obviously relevant for asset managers to some degree. The usage directive provides for a comprehensive risk management framework for investment funds that can be sold to retail and institutional investors across Europe. Amongst many other aspects, the rules cover notably the areas of risk management including portfolio concentration, liquidity, leverage, derivatives and other portfolio management techniques and the usage label has been a hugely successful part of the European framework with today more than nine trillion in assets across Europe. Compared with usage regulatory requirements for alternative investment funds focus relatively less on risks but put more owners on the fund manager's obligations. These funds are generally sold to professional investors more than retail investors and by industry estimates nowadays amount to about five trillion in net assets across Europe. So altogether we have a huge industry in Europe of usage and alternative investment funds and with the split with the UK becoming a third country basically in the absence of any transitional agreement if we end up in a hard Brexit scenario all UK usage and alternative investment funds will have to become non-EU alternative investment funds and all UK usage management companies will become non-EU alternative investment fund management companies. Similarly the EU brands for certain specific types of funds such as venture capital and long-term investment funds will no longer be available to UK funds and therefore also any UK funds having been incorporated under any of these structures will have to become non-EU aids. Therefore any UK fund will be subject to the AFMD third country provisions and usage are EU products and there is no detailed provision under the usage directive relating to funds coming from third countries. The only regime that is currently available therefore is the third country regime of the AFMD which governs the management and marketing under the AFMD private placement regime which is ultimately subject to the discretion of each member state. The impact of Brexit on the 15 trillion industry could be very significant with wide implications across the whole of the European financial system monitoring and understanding and where possible addressing in particular potential cliff edge effects currently remains an important priority for us. In that context I would like to emphasise that contingency planning by everyone for a no-deal scenario remains absolutely key. A transitional period agreeing between the UK and the EU negotiations would give some more breathing space for implementation but given the political heat surrounding that and given it as link to the overall withdrawal agreement and any future agreement it remains clearly very uncertain until a very late point in time and that's really where the kind of risk around cliff edge effects comes in. In that respect it's also worth recalling that we issued a statement in July this year which again emphasised to firms that they need to step up their preparedness preparations for the worst case scenario of not having a transitional agreement in place in March because we believe that that means firms need to consider sufficiently in advance what the kind of time horizon is that they need to actually prepare for example with an authorisation and that they need to put authorisation applications in early enough to make sure that they can get through the process in the individual national countries in good time. Looking specifically at asset management ESMA has identified several key risk sources under this worst case scenario or no-deal scenario. The first one is around passporting as I already said basically UK usits and aves would lose the passporting rights and would be prevented from exercising activities in the EU under the current passporting regime. The other second point that I want to mention and which I will say a bit more about in a second is the whole issue of outsourcing. Investment and risk management activities delegated to UK entities would not be possible to be maintained anymore unless there is a corporation agreement agreed between the national competent authorities in the EU 27 and the FCA. Finally, there's also the issue of investor protection because it will all depend on what the UK retains in terms of its domestic regime for investor protection whether EU investors for example of USITS funds would still have the same protection if they are actually investing into a UK fund. Let me briefly say a few words on corporation agreements because that's one of the hot topics that we are asked about all the time when it comes to Brexit and particularly Brexit impact for asset management given the potential significant impact on the current business models of the asset management industry. ESMA has started internal consideration within the EU 27 setting as to what type of standard corporation agreement or MOU would be required between the EU 27 national competent authorities and the FCA. MOUs on delegation of management activities such third countries already exists under AFMD and USITS directive which are with a large number of third countries and considering the discussions with the FCA commencing the discussions with the FCA on such an MOU will however depend on the wider negotiations that are currently going on between the EU and the UK. We remain confident that such a standard MOU that would be necessary to continue the outsourcing models that are currently there could be agreed in time but we are conscious that in any case it will be important to make clear to the market sometime before the end of March on whether such corporation agreements will be in place and thus whether the current models can continue as they currently are. These issues would create issues such as the question of delegation and corporation agreements that are needed to continue that could create significant legal uncertainty that might result in some fund outflows or even potentially an impact on the broader market. Using non-supervisory data we actually have started estimating some of the cross-border investments into usards between the EU 27 and the UK and we believe that roughly amounts to around 500 billion euros at the end of 2017 or approximately 6% of the total net assets of the usards industry. So it's quite a significant part of the usards industry that is effectively affected by the cross-border split between the UK and the EU. This estimate is based on the currency of share classes sold to investors and assumes that the currency of share classes is a proxy for the source of the investment so that EU 27 largely invest in euro share classes and UK investors in pounds. That's obviously not a perfect kind of alignment but we thought at least it gives some indication of the impact. While ESMA's work focuses naturally on the mitigation of the impact of Brexit on investors funds need also to be conscious of the risk linked to any Brexit related market movements through their portfolio holdings. According to ECB data the exposure of euro area financial corporations under other than banks, insurance companies and pension funds to UK assets amounted to, sorry. I can't read Mike as this type was too small to 840 billion in Q1 2018 including two thirds in the form of debt securities. So again these are significant assets and significant exposures across the EU 27 and the UK. What we've observed looking at market impact in the context of Brexit is that markets have proved remarkably resilient to Brexit related news with movements mainly observable in currency markets so far. However the sensitivity of investors seems to have increased lately with Brexit related political developments weighing on equity prices in particular and also some outflows being observed from equity funds. This comes against the backdrop of several years of increased risk taking by EU funds in a low interest rate environment. So it's not just related to the Brexit event as such but it's more related to the overall market environment that we are facing. And what we've seen generally is lower credit quality particularly of the bond holdings in the fund industry. Moreover inflows into emerging market bond funds have outpaced by far flows into other funds since 2009 which may further reinforce investor sensitivity to negative developments under stressed conditions. Taken together these elements suggest that asset managers should remain prepared for possible sharp market corrections whatever the background to that is. Obviously Brexit and particularly the possibility of a hard Brexit is one possible situation that might in the next few months create that type of market uncertainty and adjustment of asset valuations. However I would like to caution that Brexit means the only situation that might lead us into a market correction. We live after all in uncertain times and we know that whatever the course of the change in the market sentiment might be its impact is likely to be significant particularly so with regard to the price of risky assets who by their nature are obviously the most volatile. So in conclusion we will continue our Brexit related work to ensure that we have good supervisory convergence amongst the EU 27 in how we deal with the challenges that we are facing. We will also keep monitoring Brexit related risks and work collectively with the national competent authorities and our EU partner institutions on possible mitigating actions. In the uncertain environment that Brexit presents fund managers themselves need to be however also proactive in mitigating risks to ensure that investors are sufficiently protected and remain sufficiently protected. So with that I will end my remarks and I look forward to any questions and discussions. Thank you very much for that.