Jean-Pierre Jouyet, Chairman of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), and Dominique Baudis, Chairman of the Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité (ARPP the French advertising self regulatory organization), signed an agreement today organising relations between the two authorities to regulate advertising for financial products.
Faced with the development of a certain amount of dubious advertising, notably on internet, it has become necessary to combine the expertise of both authorities to enhance and promote good practice among the professionals in question.
The AMF and ARPP share a common commitment to advertising that is fair and not misleading and have therefore decided to sign an agreement covering:
- the terms on which information will be exchanged between the two Authorities;
- organisation of joint public events;
- cooperation between the two authorities within the framework of their respective remits;
- the possibility for the AMF to refer cases to the Advertising Ethics Panel of the ARPP.
Dominique Baudis declared at the signature ceremony that “this agreement provides a concrete demonstration of the long standing commitment of the ARPP and its members (advertisers, agencies andthe media) to fair, truthful advertising, including for financial products. In the very near future, a policy statement will be published by the ARPP on advertising for complex and leveraged financial products,preparing the way for the elaboration by its members of a more general Ethical Guideline on this theme, after the opinions of the associations and professionals in the Conseil Paritaire de la Publicité (CPP), an associate body of the ARPP”.
Jean-Pierre Jouyet added that “the signature of this agreement marks a major turning point in our daily efforts to protect retail investors. Advertising is known to be a far from negligible factor in investment decisions and we hope that we will soon see the end of advertisements for financial investments offering easy gains without risk and without effort. They are all the more harmful in that they often benefit from the serious image of the media in which they are published.”
