A senior European politician has described calls from the UK's Investment Association to delay Mifid II as "premature", saying that implementing the vast changes to Europe's trading rulebook was "never going to be easy".

The Investment Association - which represents 200 firms managing £5.5 trillion of assets - said in a statement on September 15 that a revised version of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive should be pushed back from January 2017 to January 2018.