In any case, it wasn’t long before Ferber was opening doors for Cfinancials. In April 2013, Ferber forwarded Heijmeijer an email he had written to Verena Ross, then executive director of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), the EU’s security regulator. “CFINANCIALS’ services could, in my opinion, be of great use to ESMA,” Ferber wrote Ross, asking that she meet with Heijmeijer.
“Mr. Ferber requested that ESMA (European Securities and Markets Authorities [sic]) to become our client,” Heijmeijer wrote to shareholders five days later. ESMA said that no meeting was set up with Ross or the chairman at the time, Steven Maijoor.
As POLITICO previously reported, Ferber and Heijmeijer co-founded in 2013 a Switzerland-based foundation called PeoplesFinancials. In a letter to asset managers, Ferber described the foundation’s mission: “to empower ordinary people to invest with more security and confidence in capital markets,” adding that this was “made possible by TIPER.”
Heijmeijer also claimed he had influenced the writing of MiFID II, to the benefit of Cfinancials. In a 2014 letter to the company’s shareholders, Heijmeijer said Cfinancials had “produced” technical wording in MiFID II that made it compulsory for companies to use “a specific risk indicator.” “We produce such an indicator and we are the only ones,” he added. (Heijmeijer later told POLITICO he was “showing off to get people’s attention.” Ferber dismissed any notion that Cfinancials had a hand in tweaking MiFID II in its favor.)
Shortly after MiFID II became law in 2014, the duo began approaching banks. After meeting with a regulatory expert at Santander, Ferber invited executives from the bank to a workshop on MiFID II featuring Cfinancials at the Parliament on September 2, 2015. An email the next day from Wilhelm, the company’s lawyer, celebrated the success of the workshop, highlighting serious interest in TIPER from banking giants including Crédit Suisse, UBS, Rabobank, Société Générale and Santander.
Not long after, Heijmeijer sent his email detailing Ferber’s desire to set up consulting contracts via Cfinancials.
