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John Verwey

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John Verwey is a partner in the Private Funds Group. John advises on a wide number of regulatory issues at a national UK and European level, including firm authorisations, appointed representative arrangements, change in control, market abuse. He represents a variety of clients that range from small start-up fund managers to established global fund advisers and managers.

A particular area of focus for John is Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) and Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II).  This includes advising on pre-marketing and marketing strategies for fund managers, advising on the Level One and Lever Two requirements under AIFMD and implementing UK rules and legislation, and advising on the organizational and conduct of business requirements under MiFID II.

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On 24 November 2023, the Investment Association published a report on behalf of the wider Technology Working Group to the UK Government’s Asset Management Taskforce (the “Working Group”) on a “Blueprint” for the implementation of a fund tokenisation regime in the UK (the “Tokenisation Report”).

The Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) which, along with HM Treasury is an observer to the Technology Working Group, also provided input on the Tokenisation Report and launched a new fund tokenisation page on its website.

The industry focus on fund tokenisation is mainly aimed at authorised funds in the UK, rather than the unauthorised funds that are typically used within the traditional institutional-investor-focussed private equity space, but the information contained herein will nonetheless be of interest to the wider market and it will be interesting to see how things develop for the industry as a whole.

On 7 September 2023, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) set expectations ahead of its new financial promotion rules for cryptoassets (which we wrote about here).

From 8 October 2023, new rules for the marketing of cryptoassets come into force. The new requirements include the need for marketing…

In its February 2023 discussion paper (DP23/2) relating to the UK regulatory regime for asset management, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) briefly touched on fund tokenisation as an area of technological drive and change in the fund management industry. Please refer here to our update on that discussion paper.…

On 8 June 2023, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) published a policy statement (PS23/6) on the financial promotion rules for cryptoassets (the “Policy Statement”). This is accompanied by a guidance consultation (GC23/1), where the FCA is seeking feedback on proposed guidance to the Policy Statement.

On 19 January 2022, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) published a consultation paper (CP22/2) (the “Consultation”) setting out its proposals to strengthen its financial promotion rules for high-risk investments (including cryptoassets), as well as for authorised firms which approve and communicate such financial promotions. The Consultation builds on feedback received to its discussion paper (DP21/1) on how the FCA could strengthen financial promotion rules and also forms part of its ongoing work on addressing harm in the consumer investment sector, to pursue its Consumer Investments Strategy as published in September 2021.

The proposals set out in the Consultation relate to financial promotions for “high-risk investments,” being those which are subject to marketing restrictions under the FCA rules. This includes investment based-crowdfunding, peer-to-peer agreements, other non-readily realisable securities, non-mainstream pooled investments and speculative illiquid securities. The FCA has also confirmed that these will also include cryptoassets once they are brought into scope of the FCA’s financial promotions regime. Some of the key changes the FCA is seeking to implement, as set out in the Consultation, are as follows:

On January 23, 2019, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) issued its widely anticipated “Guidance on Cryptoassets” consultation paper CP19/3 (the “Consultation”). The Consultation followed the UK Cryptoassets Task Force’s publication last October, which set out the UK’s policy and regulatory approach to cryptoassets and distributed…