France's Financial Markets Authority (AMF) published a synthesis of SPOT thematic inspections of digitised client journeys at four authorised investment firms, covering steps from online information and client areas through to order placement. The review identifies weaknesses affecting the quality of information provided to retail investors and calls on firms expanding online or app-based investment offerings to strengthen their investor-protection arrangements. The AMF assessed practices over 1 January 2023 to 31 May 2025, including onboarding data collection for opening a securities account or a French equity savings plan (PEA), the MiFID client questionnaire used to assess knowledge and experience, and how these inputs feed into investor profiling. It found material heterogeneity: for two firms, accounts and PEAs could not be opened online and the digital journey mainly supported order placement while initial client information was collected in branch; a third firm showed a gradual increase in online account openings; only one offered the full end-to-end journey online. The AMF highlighted four fragility areas: essential disclosures on the nature of online services were sometimes incomplete or hard to read and could confuse clients about the service provided, investor questionnaires varied in robustness and could be undermined by insufficient question granularity or frequent client changes, warnings on product inappropriateness were sometimes ambiguous, and internal controls did not sufficiently reflect the specific risks of autonomous digital journeys.

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