France’s Financial Markets Authority (AMF) today outlined its supervisory priorities for 2022.
The AMF has at its disposal a number of supervisory tools, ranging from ongoing monitoring to specific inspections. About 60 inspections will be performed in 2022. They will break down almost equally between two types of inspections which have different objectives:
- Regular inspections of market participants that are large or represent particular risks or have been the subject of specific alerts;
- Thematic inspections of a sample of market participants (generally five for each theme) in order to better understand a given activity or practice, assess implementation of the rules or explore potential risks for investors or markets. Established in 2018, these inspections are called SPOT inspections, for “Supervision des Pratiques Opérationnelle et Thématique” (operational and thematic supervision of practices), carried out in parallel on several market participants and in a shorter time than conventional inspections.
In 2021, the AMF conducted a set of SPOT inspections. A number of these focused on assessments of the suitability of a financial instrument for the situation of retail clients in the context of investment advice.
Despite the efforts made by professionals since the entry into force of MiFID II at the start of 2018, the AMF noted significant shortcomings concerning the gathering of information on clients and the assessment of their knowledge. Moreover, the suitability reports are not always submitted and some institutions provide no explanation regarding the appropriateness of the recommendation for the client’s situation.
Numerous good practices were also detected, such as the use of scenarios presenting the risk/reward ratio, assessment of the client’s reaction faced with a market downturn, or the use of different suitability report templates depending on the type of recommendation given.
Let’s note that AMF’s priority themes for 2022 regarding supervision of the professionals placed under its authority cover three groups of activity:
- Asset management, and in particular collective investment management;
- The activities of market intermediaries and infrastructures;
- Financial product marketing and financial investment advisory services, activities for we also describe the supervisory work carried out with the Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution (ACPR) within the framework of the ACPR-AMF Joint Unit.