Last week I was in the beautiful city of Madrid, where besides analysing the impact of upcoming MiFID II regulation, I’ve been catching up on the Spanish Market Reforms. The upcoming changes, aka La Reforma, promise to align the Spanish market with European peers and improve competitiveness. Spain’s clearing, settlement and registry system overhaul is being tackled in 2 phases, currently underway with the introduction of a central counterparty (CCP) for equities during 2015 followed by the inclusion of fixed income and Target2Securities (T2S) by early 2017. Which all points to a very large helping of market change in Spain over the next 2 years, even before they get to MiFID II which will have to be implemented before January 2017!