How the Act compares.
The Act did not invent its tools. Its twelve provisions map, almost one for one, onto requirements that investment firms, senior bankers, crypto businesses and payment companies already live with. This grid traces each provision back to its regulatory parents, including Gibraltar's DLT framework, which showed how a small jurisdiction could licence an entirely new industry around principles rather than rulebooks.
| The Act requires | MiFID IIInvestment markets · 2018 | SM&CRSenior managers · UK · 2016–19 | MiCACrypto-assets · EU · 2024 | Gibraltar DLTDistributed ledger · 2018 | Payment ServicesPSD2 / PSRs · 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Licensing | FCA authorisation to do business | Senior roles individually approved | CASP authorisation | DLT provider licence from the GFSC | Authorisation with conditions |
| 2 · Financial sustainability | Capital adequacy and wind-down planning | Named senior owner of financial resources | Own-funds requirements | Adequate financial and non-financial resources | Own funds plus safeguarding |
| 3 · ODSE fitness | Fit-and-proper management | The FIT test: the ODSE test's blueprint | Good repute of management | Fit-and-proper controllers and directors | Directors assessed as fit and proper |
| 4 · Fan engagement | Client best-interest rules; Consumer Duty | Conduct rules on customer treatment | Fair, clear communication to holders | Customer care and communication principle | Consumer protections and dispute rules |
| 5 · Heritage | None: football-first | None | None | None | None |
| 6 · Prohibited competitions | Operate only within permissions granted | None | Whitelist of authorised services | Licence defines permitted activities | Registration defines permitted services |
| 7 · Revenue distribution | None: football-first | None | None | None | None |
| 8 · Insolvency duties | Notify the regulator of anything material | Personal duty of responsibility | Orderly wind-down plans | Contingency and resilience planning | Customer funds ring-fenced on failure |
| 9 · Information & reporting | Transaction reporting and record-keeping | Statements of responsibility on file | Ongoing disclosure obligations | Record-keeping and GFSC reporting | Incident and fraud reporting |
| 10 · Ownership transparency | Change-in-control approval | Certification of key individuals | Qualifying-holding approval | Controller notification and approval | Qualifying-holding assessment |
| 11 · EDI | FCA diversity and inclusion expectations | Culture as a supervisory focus | Not yet | Not yet | Not yet |
| 12 · Review clause | MiFID II is itself a revision of MiFID | Regime extended to all firms in 2019 | Built-in review clauses | Tenth principle added in 2020 | PSD2 replaced PSD1; PSD3 in draft |
Simplified for orientation, not legal advice. Two rows have no regulatory parent: heritage protection and revenue distribution are the Act's genuine innovations, born from football itself. Everything else has been running in regulated industries for years, which is why executives from those industries find the IFR so familiar.