We’ve updated our rules on information sharing during UK equity initial public offerings (IPOs) to reduce market risk and frictions in the UK IPO process for issuers and market participants.
We’ve removed certain requirements from our rules.
Firms no longer need to wait 7 days between publishing an approved registration document/prospectus and connected research. This will reduce the length of the IPO process by 7 days for most issuers and lower market risk.
Firms publishing connected IPO research no longer need to share the same information with a range of unconnected analysts as they do with their own research analysts. This will improve the flow of information to analysts and reduce compliance costs and burdens for issuers.
This Policy Statement affects:
Firms and issuers can still choose to engage with unconnected analysts during the IPO process. This is no longer required by our rules. Any such arrangements should be agreed on a commercial basis.
We will continue to consider the feedback to our discussion questions on the remaining aspects of the 2018 reforms. We welcome further input on this, and the role of research in equity markets more widely.
Our 2018 rules were designed to encourage independent research during the UK equity IPO process (PS17/23). But the rules did not always work as intended. Instead, they added costs and market risk for issuers without clear benefits.
We consulted on changes in CP26/14 (PDF).
These changes support our objective to enhance market integrity by removing unnecessary risk and friction from the listing process. They also advance our secondary objective of supporting the competitiveness and growth of UK markets – helping companies access capital and giving investors access to a wider range of investment opportunities.
We also included discussion questions on the remaining aspects of the 2018 IPO information flows rules to help explore where there are more opportunities to reform these rules.
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