COB 7.6 Timely execution

In accordance with Principle 2 (Skill, care and diligence) and Principle 6 (Customers' interests), this section requires a firm when it agrees or decides in its discretion to execute a current customer order to do so with due skill, care and diligence and to act in the best interests of customers in selecting the most opportune time to execute the current customer order.

This section applies only to current customer orders, as opposed to customer orders. A customer order that can be executed immediately is a current customer order. A customer order that is to be executed on fulfilment of a condition, only becomes a current customer order once that condition is satisfied.

Examples of situations in which a firm should take particular care to assess the timing of execution of all or part of a current customer order include when:

1. (1)

   a firm receives a customer order outside the normal trading hours of the relevant market or trading platform and intends executing that customer order on that market or other trading platform;

2. (2)

   a foreseeable improvement in the level of liquidity in the relevant designated investment is likely to enhance the terms on which the firm executes the customer order;

3. (3)

   executing the customer order as a series of partial executions over a period of time is likely to improve the terms on which the customer order as a whole is executed.

A firm may have reasonable grounds for postponing execution of a current customer order in the best interests of the customer. Examples of this may include when the deal is part of an aggregated transaction (see COB 7.7 (Aggregation and allocation)) for:

1. (1)

   one or more customers; or

2. (2)

   for the firm and one or more customers (including all those who would otherwise have priority over any other person for whom the deal is done);

and the firm has taken reasonable steps to ensure that the deal will not operate to the disadvantage of any of the customers concerned.

COB 7.12 (Customer order and execution records) contains the requirements for recording customer order and execution details.