SEC and AMF announce supervisory MoU to enhance cooperation for investment advisers and investment service providers

The AMF and the U.S. SEC have signed a supervisory memorandum of understanding intended to formalise day-to-day cooperation when the two regulators oversee investment advisers and investment service providers active in France and the United States. For RegCanary subscribers, the significance lies less in new rulemaking than in supervisory plumbing: the MoU establishes agreed channels for exchanging information, coordinating supervisory activity and escalating concerns between Paris and Washington. The practical effect is that cross-border oversight should become faster and more predictable — and considerably more transparent to both regulators about how a firm conducts itself.

What this means for compliance teams: firms holding dual authorisation, or serving European clients through U.S. entities (or U.S. clients through EU entities), should assume that supervisory correspondence, examination findings and remediation plans may now travel between the two authorities more readily than before. Divergent disclosures, marketing materials, fee arrangements or suitability and appropriateness processes across jurisdictions are more likely to be identified and challenged. Recommended actions: (1) map cross-border advisory, distribution and booking arrangements to identify which entity is supervised by which authority; (2) review client disclosures, privacy notices and information-sharing consents for consistency with heightened regulator-to-regulator exchange; (3) confirm that a single, defensible conduct standard is applied across both jurisdictions; (4) brief boards and senior management that historical findings in one market may become visible in the other.

Overall this is a moderate-impact, low-urgency strategic watch item. It creates no immediate filing obligation, but it raises the cost of inconsistent cross-border governance and rewards firms with genuinely global compliance frameworks. UK firms are affected only indirectly, where they operate through French or U.S. subsidiaries or delegate to entities in those markets.