A giant war room

Here’s what we know: the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) is a sophisticated piece of legislation. GPs may not like it (albeit their lawyers probably do). Nonetheless, it’s no mean feat to harmonize Europe’s current messy patchwork of private placement regimes, especially in today’s political climate. GPs that meet the directive can hop seamlessly across borders while fundraising, comfortable in the knowledge that only one national regulator must be answered to. 

However, this does raise the question: how are regulators keeping tracking of all this? How does the UK regulator know what managers have been authorized by its French counterpart? In the brave new world of AIFMD, we were fondly imagining a giant subterranean war room, with gigantic servers protected by rifle-toting guardsmen.

Turns out the answer is a little more mundane than that. When applying for authorization with their home regulator, managers just fill out a form marking out which EU countries they intend on marketing in. Based on that list, each regulator then lets the other countries know through a request form. Which, we think you’ll agree, is pretty dull. Maybe we can jazz things up a bit in time for AIFMD 2.0?