The European Union has introduced legal requirements to prevent miss selling of products. The investment firm is responsible to determine the right target group and then to ensure via a tailored distribution strategy products do not (structurally) end up outside the target group. BinckBank has not followed these obligatory legal product governance rules. This especially concerns the following:

1. The product governance policy of BinckBank is insufficient, because it is not sufficiently clear how BinckBank sets up target groups for its products taking sufficiently into account the product characteristics and the degree of complexity of a product. It is not sufficiently clear in what way BinckBank formulates an appropriate distribution strategy. Furthermore it is missing in the policy among others how BinckBank checks that products are not structurally distributed outside the target group.

2. The evaluation which BinckBank has performed for SPAC’s and options is not sufficient, because for both product groups the target group is insufficiently determined, no substantiated distribution strategy is available, and no evaluation performed whether the products are distributed to the target group and not (structurally) outside the target group. As off 3 June 2022 BinckBank has two months to make various changes in its policy and four months to conduct robust evaluations.