Monitoring of promotional documentation: the AMF changes its approach regarding various financial products for private individuals

The Autorité des Marchés Financiers (the AMF, the French financial markets authority) announced a change in the organization of controls on promotional documents relating to UCITS and alternative investment funds (AIFs), as well as for titres de créances structurés (structured debt securities) issued by banks and fonds à formule (structured funds), when these financial instruments are marketed to the public in France. The AMF will cease to carry out systematic controls of the promotional documents before their communication to the public and will henceforth favor ex-post controls. Consequently, the obligation to attach promotional documents to the fund’s authorization application is now circumscribed to a limitative list of AIFs presenting a greater risk of wrongful marketing to the public. The AMF provides that promotional documents must be sent by the portfolio management companies on their GECO extranet, so that it can carry out the ex-post controls.

These changes in the monitoring of promotional documents are applicable as from October 8, 2018, even if the AMF instructions relating to the concerned products (and in particular the annexes setting out the content of the authorization files) will only be updated at a later date.

Read: The announcement (French)

MiFID II and the new regime for portfolio management companies: new update

The Autorité des Marchés Financiers (the AMF, the French financial markets authority) updated its doctrine in order to take into account the impact of the legislative and regulatory provisions resulting from the entry into force of MiFID II, which, among other things, resulted in the split of the legal regimes of portfolio management companies and investment firms. To that effect, the AMF updated its Instructions n° 2008-04 and n° 2013-07 and its Position-Recommandation n° 2006-23. Beyond this formal update, the Position-Recommandation n° 2006-23 and the Instruction n° 2013-07 have been subject to some substantial modifications, especially with respect to the regime of the Conseillers en Investissements Financiers (French investment advisors, a French national regime). Furthermore, the AMF created a new Instruction n° 2018-11 on the content of management mandates concluded with non-professional clients.

Read: The announcement

AMF issues Q&A regarding the prohibition to advertise investment services relating to certain financial contracts

Article L. 533-127 of the French Monetary and Financial Code (Code monétaire et financier) prohibits investment services providers from advertising by electronic means, directly or indirectly, to clients who may not be professionals (including potential clients) investment services relating to financial contracts which are not admitted to trading on a regulated market or a multilateral trading facility, falling within one of the categories of contracts defined in Article 314-7 of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (the AMF, the French financial markets authority) General Regulations and having one of the characteristics referred to in that Article of the French Monetary and Financial Code (i.e., mainly certain financial derivatives and binary options).

Within this framework, the AMF issued a Q&A to clarify the scope of this prohibition.

Read: The Q&A (French)

AMF launches consultation on the modification of the 600 € criterion when changing the categorization of a client

Following the update on May 25, 2018 of the ESMA Q&A on MiFID II and MiFIR investor protection and intermediaries topics, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (the AMF, the French financial markets authority) has launched a consultation on the modification of the 600 € criterion employed where a non-professional client requests to be treated as a professional client by an investment service provider.