By issuing of the Secure Electronic Prospectus Portal Regulation (SEPP-V; Secure Electronic Prospectus Portal-Verordnung) today, the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) has created the necessary regulatory basis for the end-to-end electronic submission and approval of capital market prospectuses from the start of 2025. The Regulation defines the technical aspects that are required to be fulfilled so that a prospectus submitted to the FMA electronically, is able to be unequivocally assigned to the party making the submission and the issuer. Electronic identity (E-ID; Elektronische Identität) functions are used for this purpose. The legal conditions have thereby been created to allow the market and the supervisor to make specific preparations for the innovative digital portal for capital market prospectuses, which is due to go online at the turn of the new year. The technical solution conforms to the harmonised EU legal framework[1], with the result that capital market prospectuses will be available throughout the European Single Market.
A milestone for the FMA’s digitalisation strategy
“The FMA’s is advancing its digitalisation strategy in a consequent manner,” remarked the FMA’s Executive Directors, Helmut Ettl and Eduard Müller: “Our ‘Secure Electronic Prospectus Portal – SEPP‘ is an important milestone in being able to communicate with the market in a modern and secure way. Recently we overhauled the FMA Incoming Platform, our reporting platform for supervised entities, and extended its functions to include two way communications. VERBA (Verbraucherbeschwerde- und Anfrage-Datenbank), our new consumer complaints and enquiries database, supports the exchange of information with consumers using artificial intelligence, to ensure that information gets to where it is needed quickly.”
SEPP will allow the FMA to offer one of the most cutting edge portals for submitting capital market prospectuses in Europe. A party submitting a prospectus is able to prove their identity electronically, and to authenticate the submitted prospectus digitally, also on behalf of the issuer. Once the prospectus has been scrutinised, the FMA may then transmit the prospectus with an electronic stamp of approval and without any media discontinuity to the issuer for publication and to the Oesterreichische Kontrollbank (OeKB) for electronic filing.
Journalists may address further enquiries to:
Klaus Grubelnik
+43 / (0)1 / 24959-6006 or +43 / (0)676 88 249 516
[1] Regulation (EU) No 910/2014