The Financial Services and Markets Authority is Belgium's conduct regulator. Belgium operates a twin-peaks model: the National Bank of Belgium handles prudential supervision, while the FSMA covers market conduct, product rules, financial intermediaries, listed company disclosure, supplementary pensions and financial education. It also supervises anti-money-laundering compliance for the entities within its remit.
What the FSMA publishes
- Circulars and communications, its instruments for setting supervisory expectations
- Regulations approved by royal decree
- Warnings naming unauthorised firms and suspected fraud, published frequently
- Administrative sanctions and settlement decisions
- Public registers of authorised intermediaries and approved prospectuses
- Sector studies, data through its portal, and annual reports
Why it matters for compliance teams
Belgium applies some of the stricter product rules in Europe — including a distribution ban on certain complex instruments for retail investors — and those rules are expressed in FSMA regulations and circulars rather than in the underlying EU directives. The FSMA also supervises supplementary pensions, which is unusual and puts occupational pension obligations under the conduct regulator rather than the prudential one.
Seqlense DOC indexes FSMA circulars, regulations and sanctions in full text alongside the NBB's prudential material and the ESMA and EIOPA standards behind both.