After giving brokers and exchange operators a new reason to worry last week by announcing them that they would need to implement information security standards and obtain certification for them, the CNVM decided on Wednesday night to waive this requirement indefinitely. The decision of the Commission came after several rounds of discussions with the management of the Bucharest Stock Exchange and of the Association of Brokers who were unhappy with the fact that obtaining the certification for the Information Security Management System (SMSI) actually involved costs that could go as high as tens of thousands of Euros, which are hard to bear at a time like this. Brokers opposed the idea from the start, claiming that there was no way their transaction commissions would be enough to help them recoup the cost of obtaining the SMSI certification.

"There were some meetings with the Commissioners of the CNVM in which we showed that the standards for the SMSI certification aren"t implemented by any European intermediaries and that only two exchanges have implemented them of their own accord, without being required to", said sources who did not wish for their names to be disclosed, adding: "Obtaining a SMSI certification is expensive, such an operation takes about six months, during which time some of the staff needs to be diverted to this task, even though those employees would be needed to do the job for which they were hired in the first place. It"s not information standardization that we lack, what we lack is investors on the stock market, more trades ... we can do data standardization further down the road".

According to the Romanian National Securities Commission Instruction no. 2/2011, issued in early February, obtaining a SMSI certification would become mandatory on January 1st 2012, for brokers with an initial capital of 730,000 Euros, for asset management