The European Parliament's economics committee Thursday backed plans to delay the start of the EU's updated markets in financial instruments trading rules, known as MiFID 2, by a year to January 3, 2018.
It also voted to open talks to agree the delay with the EU Council, representing the EU's 28 national governments.
The European Commission proposed the delay in February, after EU financial authority ESMA said last October that regulators and companies needed more time to prepare for the new obligations.
The parliament, council and EC all have to agree on the delay for it to become binding.
A key reason for the delay is that the EC has not yet finalized the secondary legislation setting out the detailed rules for implementing MiFID 2.
This includes ESMA's draft regulatory technical standards on ancillary activity, submitted to the EC last September, which included thresholds for deciding when non-financial companies trading commodity derivatives should be covered by the MiFID 2 rules.
The EC last month asked ESMA to rethink these draft standards.
An EU source said at the time that the EC wanted ESMA to take a more cautious approach to setting the thresholds in the early years of the new regime, building up to a final regime once more data is available.
ESMA has said it will submit a new opinion on the standards by May 10.
