European regulators have laid out long-awaited plans as to how they intend to bring greater transparency to the way fund managers use dealing commissions to pay for broker research from 2017.

The EU's top financial regulator, the European Securities and Markets Authority, has stopped short of proposing an outright ban on the use of client commissions as a way of paying for research. But Esma goes further than any regulator has gone before, by proposing much greater transparency over research payments and demanding a clearer split between research and execution costs.