Website disclosures

A separate provision of the SFDR requires firms with funds within the scope of Articles 8 and 9 to publish and maintain certain information on their websites.

This includes information specified in the Level 2 Regulatory Technical Standards (which covers some elements of the information supplied to the pre-contractual disclosures and information relating to the firm’s methodologies and data sources to assess, measure and monitor the environmental or social characteristics for the fund). The information specified in the Level 2 Regulatory Technical Standards requires a summary of the set of information supplied, which must be provided in one of the official languages of the home Member State and, where different and where the financial product is made available in more than one Member State, in an additional language customary in the sphere of international finance, and, where the financial product is made available in a host Member State, one of the official languages of that host Member State.

The SFDR requires firms to publish this information on a “prominent easily accessible area of the website”. Since the inception of the SFDR, there has been uncertainty as to whether firms should make this information publicly available, although the wording of the SFDR suggests that it should be. There are concerns on how this obligation corresponds with confidentiality obligations and the laws of some non-EU jurisdictions on marketing private funds.