Compliance & Ethics

The SEC's Division of Examinations published a Risk Alert detailing observations on how investment advisers conduct the annual compliance review required under the Advisers Act compliance rule (Rule 206(4)-7). The alert identifies areas advisers should consider and encourages them to strengthen their review processes. Compliance teams should treat it as a preview of examination priorities and benchmark their current review practices against it.

The FSA's September 14, 2026 weekly review lists a draft partial amendment to the Comprehensive Guidelines for Supervision for Insurance Companies, new sustainability assurance and growth-funding council activity, and disaster-related measures for financial institutions. It also lists an unregistered money lending warning and draft EDINET Taxonomy updates for 2027. Compliance teams with Japanese operations should review the open consultation and the disaster reporting relief now, because several items carry action dates or likely downstream obligations.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) projects that households and businesses will pay an average of 20 percent more for electricity and natural-gas transport in 2027. For an average household, that is roughly EUR $89 more per year for electricity and EUR $52 more for gas. The increase is the first under a new revenue methodology and is driven by system operators' investment needs of approximately EUR $235 Billion over 15 years. Compliance teams with Dutch exposure should reassess energy cost assumptions, pass-through arrangements, and customer communications.

BaFin has published Circulars 10/2026 (BA) and 11/2026 (BA), setting out its administrative practice and expectations for appointing refinancing register administrators under the KWG and trustees under the PfandBG, including their deputies. Institutions must demonstrate that candidates are independent, reliable, and sufficiently expert. Compliance teams at covered institutions should review their appointment files and processes against these expectations.

The CNMV has completed its review of the first AML/CFT information reports (BCFT1, covering 2025) submitted by securities firms and agencies, asset managers, and crypto asset service providers. Overall report quality was adequate, but the CNMV found erroneous and inconsistent data and signs of possible compliance gaps, particularly in alert generation and special examinations. Compliance teams should expect these findings to inform further supervisory work.

BaFin has amended the Securities Institutions Audit Report Regulation and the Crowdfunding Service Providers Audit Regulation, effective September 11, 2026, to align audit requirements with DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554). Auditors must now apply these more detailed requirements during annual audits, so compliance teams at affected firms should confirm their ICT risk documentation and evidence are audit-ready.

The European Banking Authority issued its quarterly update to the validation rules in its reporting frameworks, deactivating some rules due to inaccuracies or IT issues and reactivating others. It also released a validation rules package (a micro taxonomy and DPM update scripts) required from release 4.0 onward. Compliance and regulatory reporting teams should confirm that their validation logic matches the updated rule set to avoid false errors and resubmissions.