The Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) has released the latest findings from its 2025 Outcomes-Based Supervision (OBS) initiative, signalling a more intensive supervisory focus on how investment firms treat regular retail investors in practice. The authority’s work goes beyond traditional compliance checks to assess actual outcomes for clients.
The latest phase of the initiative concentrates on two core areas: a broad review of online marketing practices by investment firms and a targeted "Dear CEO" letter addressing systemic weaknesses in the management of client complaints. The measures follow a year of supervisory work examining real-world investor experiences.
Online marketing and risk disclosures
The MFSA identified widespread shortcomings in risk warnings for complex products such as contracts for difference (CFDs). According to the authority, these warnings were frequently hidden or downplayed, often overshadowed by promotional perks. The review also found that third-party affiliates and introductory brokers were frequently left without adequate oversight.
In response, Maltese regulators are mandating localized, highly visible risk disclosures for all advertisements. Firms must implement continuous post-publication tracking of marketing materials to ensure that risk information remains clear and compliant over time. The MFSA has clarified that investment firms will be held directly liable for any non-compliant promotional materials published by external partners or introducing brokers (IBs).
To address these risks, firms are instructed to de-risk their partner networks. This includes deploying automated web-scraping compliance tools to monitor online content and enforcing stricter legal contracts with affiliates and IBs to ensure ongoing adherence to regulatory standards.
Complaints handling and governance
The MFSA’s "Dear CEO" letter highlights broad deficiencies in how firms handle and interpret client complaints. The regulator has introduced a firm 15-working-day deadline for resolving complaints, moving away from previous practices in which C-level executives were routinely involved in daily grievances rather than focusing on strategic oversight.
Supervisory work showed that most brokerages treat complaints as isolated administrative tasks instead of viewing them as a source of risk management information. As a result, firms often fail to identify systemic technical, operational or educational shortcomings that may be affecting their client base.
Through the OBS initiative, the MFSA is pushing firms to integrate complaints data into their broader risk and governance frameworks. The authority’s latest measures underscore a shift towards supervision that prioritizes concrete investor outcomes, particularly in the areas of marketing transparency, partner oversight and structured, timely responses to client concerns.
