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No licence and/or prospectus obligation? An exemption notice is compulsory!

Institutions that invoke a supervision exemption for an activity are obliged to include an exemption notice in their promotional statements, consisting of a sentence and a symbol.

The obligation applies to institutions that are exempt from both supervision by the AFM and from the licence requirement and/or the prospectus requirement. If you are exempt from the licence and/or prospectus obligation, you have to present one of the following:

Compulsory sentence if exempt from holding a licence:

Voorbeeld van vrijstellingsvermelding vergunning - Engels

Compulsory sentence if exempt from an approved prospectus:

Voorbeeld van afbeelding vrijstellingsvermelding prospectus - Engels

Compulsory sentence if exempt from holding a licence and from an approved prospectus:

Voorbeeld van afbeelding vrijstellingsvermelding vergunning en prospectus - Engels

The AFM website contains image files and sound files that can be downloaded for your use.

Information and downloads compulsory exemption notice

Optional sentences in English are also provided; these are only to be used in combination with one or more of the aforementioned compulsory sentences in Dutch.

Products requiring an exemption notice include those offering securities and investment objects over EUR 100,000.

By using the exemption notice, you contribute to a better protection for investors. The purpose of the prescribed notices of exemption is to make investors aware that the activities concerned are exempt from supervision by the AFM, and that they must therefore take additional risks into account.

The relevant exemption notice has to be part of all promotional statements aimed at private investors (existing and potential). This concerns a wide range of statements, which can differ by type of activity: offers, advertisements, website texts, documents that promote offers, and/or other non-obligatory pre-contractual information. In the Further Regulations on the Supervision of the Conduct of Financial Undertakings, AFM sets out how and where the exemption notice has to appear.

Conditions for using the exemption notice