On 26 April 2018, the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (Autoriteit Financiële Markten, the AFM) and the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank, DNB) published their legislative letters for 2018. The AFM and the DNB annually send legislative letters to the Dutch Minister of Finance in which they set out relevant European and national developments for the financial sector and discuss desired legislative changes to address bottlenecks in legislation, with the aim to making their supervision more effective.
Among other things, the AFM calls for:
- a coordinate response at the European level to address risks arising from investing in cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. The AFM believes that the Dutch Minister of Finance should take up a leading role in this respect;
- international and European cooperation to ensure that there is adequate supervision that ensures that consumers’ interest are taken into account in big data analyses;
- a legal basis enabling the sharing of information between the AFM and the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens);
- an investigation to see where the AFM can help the Dutch Minister of Finance to battle investment fraud; and
- a discussion with the Dutch Minister of Finance to see how the fine categories laid down in Dutch legislation can be better aligned with relevant European directives (e.g. MiFID II).
Among other things, DNB calls for setting limitations to the volume of deposits held by branch offices of non-EEA banks.
The Dutch Minister of Finance has responded to each of the proposed legislative changes of DNB and the AFM in a separate overview.
View the AFM’s legislative letter (Dutch only), 26 April 2018.
View DNB’s legislative letter (Dutch only), 26 April 2018.
View the Minister’s response to the letters (Dutch only), 26 April 2018.