The Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) sets out its 2023-2024 work plan to further its core objectives of protecting investors, maintaining fair, efficient, and transparent markets, and addressing systemic risks. Additionally, IOSCO published a report on international work to develop a global assurance framework for sustainability-related corporate reporting.
The 2023-2024 Work Program builds on ongoing priorities identified in the 2021-2022 work program, the internal workplans of the Board-level Financial Stability Engagement Group (FSEG) and Board Taskforces, selected sectoral initiatives of IOSCO Board Committees, as well as new workstreams to emerge from the Board prioritization discussions of October 2022 that were supported by the 2023 Risk Outlook. As part of the 2023-2024 work priorities, IOSCO will:
- Maintain its resolve to strengthen the financial resilience of the global capital markets by addressing the pre-identified vulnerabilities in the Non-Bank Financial Intermediation sector (NBFI), in tandem with the Financial Stability Board (FSB).
- Identify and assess emerging risks and vulnerabilities within the private finance sector as a new priority for the 2023-2024 work program. The work will seek to understand how and whether risks in this area could spill over to public capital markets (that is, the primary issuance and secondary trading markets) and/or harm investors, undermine market integrity, or potentially give rise to systemic risk.
- Focus on delivering work under its core mandates of supporting market effectiveness and protecting investors.
- Focus on follow up work stemming from IOSCO’s Retail Market Conduct Task Force stock-take of regulatory approaches regarding conduct in retail markets, published in first quarter of 2023.
- Continue its efforts in contributing to the urgent goal of improving the completeness, consistency and comparability of sustainability reporting under the stewardship of its Board-level Sustainability Taskforce (STF).
- Review the first set of standards developed by the IFRS International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to determine whether they can be endorsed as a global framework for sustainability related corporate disclosures.
- Maintain the momentum reached under its July 2022 crypto-asset roadmap, to assess and respond to the risks associated with crypto-asset market activities and decentralized finance under the stewardship of the Board-level Fintech Taskforce (FTF).
- Sustain its efforts in other important areas, including matters of special importance to growth and emerging markets (GEM), its collaboration with the FSB and standard setting bodies, as well as implementation monitoring, capacity building for its members and supporting investor education as a critical pillar of investor protection.
The report on sustainability-related corporate reporting elaborates on IOSCO’s support for the ongoing work of the international standard-setters—the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) and the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA)—to develop profession-agnostic assurance and ethics (including independence) standards over sustainability-related information. Both standard-setters aim to issue exposure drafts in the second half of 2023, approving the standards on a timeframe that should allow for issuers and assurance providers to familiarize themselves with the content ahead of the end-2024 reporting period. The report findings show that there is growing demand among investors for high-quality assurance over sustainability-related information. Thus, IOSCO encourages continued strong system-wide engagement by all stakeholders in the development of a high-quality assurance framework and supporting capacity building across the ecosystem.
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