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: