French regulator: Don't starve retail market of innovation

Just because a structured product uses derivatives or sophisticated systems to measure risk performance does not mean it must be characterised as complex and restricted to sophisticated investors, says Guillaume Eliet, managing director at the French financial markets regulator. By Gillian Carr

Hopes that EU regulation will take account of 'intelligibility'

"Retail investors should not be deprived of innovative products as long as they can perfectly understand the risk they take," said Guillaume Eliet, managing director, regulation policy and international affairs division at Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), in the keynote address to the Structured Products Europe conference in London on November 18.

Eliet referred to the late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, as someone who realised that sometimes putting an emphasis on the simplicity of a