On 30 September 2021, the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (Autoriteit Financiële Markten, the AFM) published a letter on incident reporting. The AFM also announced that it is going to conduct a follow-up investigation into the reporting of incidents by asset managers.

The reason for this is that there has been no increase in the number of incident reports despite the AFM addressing this topic at the end of 2020. Therefore, the AFM has undertaken an initial inventory that involved discussions with a number of firms and industry associations. In the letter the AFM explains what is meant by ‘incident reporting’ and discusses the issues that some firms experience when reporting incidents. Finally, the AFM emphasises the importance of agreements with service providers regarding the reporting of incidents and its concerns regarding IT-related incidents.

The follow-up investigation will involve a review of the implemented policies and procedures in their business with regard to incidents and how firms comply with the reporting obligation. The firms to be selected will be approached on an individual basis.