AMF publishes a best practice guide to preparing advertising materials for complex debt securities
10 July 2010
The aim is to inform the industry about the practices identified as being potentially in breach of prevailing regulations and about the practices that help improve the standard of disclosure.
With an increasing number of complex debt securities being marketed to retail investors, the Autorité des marchés financiers (AMF) has published a guide containing an analysis of the associated advertising materials
The guide incorporates much of the content of another best practice guide – to the preparation of advertising materials for and the marketing of financial instruments, with particular reference to collective investment schemes (CIS) – published on 30 July 2009 and updated on 21 June 2010. It also contains sections dealing with specific considerations to be taken into account when marketing complex debt securities.
The AMF makes a particularly careful analysis of the advertising materials sent to it before publication, since offering circulars for complex debt securities are not, in practice, intended as an advertising medium for selling these products to the general public.
Ultimately, the new guide will be merged with the CIS guide because complex financial instruments, whether sold through CIS or as debt securities, have the same marketing implications. Further, they come within the scope of both the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive and the Prospectus Directive.
© AMF - Autorité des Marchés Financiers
