ACPR complaints and conduct reporting for a foreign payment institution in France

ACPR complaints and conduct reporting runs on its own supervisory track in France, separate from the prudential and AML cycles. The ACPR (for credit institutions, EMEs and payment institutions) and the AMF (for investment firms and CASPs) collect structured data on customer complaints, mediator interactions and conduct outcomes, while the DGCCRF — France’s consumer-protection authority — polices the broader consumer-law layer. Three authorities, three intakes, three cadences, and a set of reconciliation expectations that turn a sloppy complaints log into an inspection finding. This piece walks through who reports what, where, and how the conduct cycle fits next to the rest of the French supervisory catalogue — with worked examples showing how the framework bites in practice.

1. Who supervises conduct in France

• ACPR — conduct supervision for credit institutions, EMEs, payment institutions, branches of foreign PSPs, and certain insurers. It operates the Pôle commun ACPR-AMF for cross-sectoral customer-protection issues.
• AMF — conduct supervision for investment firms (PSIs), CASPs, asset managers and financial advisers.
• DGCCRF — the Direction Générale de la Concurrence, de la Consommation et de la Répression des Fraudes, France’s general consumer-protection and market-surveillance authority. It engages on consumer-law matters that touch financial services: advertising, contractual fairness, marketing practices.
• Médiateur de l’AMF / mediation bodies on the banking side — independent dispute-resolution mechanisms that retail customers can use once the firm’s internal complaint handling is exhausted.

For a payments or e-money firm, the practical consequence is that a single customer grievance can surface through three doors at once: the firm’s own complaints channel, a mediator referral, and a DGCCRF consumer report. Each leaves a data trail the supervisor can cross-check.

2. Legal basis

• Code monétaire et financier — conduct rules and reporting obligations for credit institutions, EMEs and payment institutions.
• Code de la consommation — French consumer-protection rules layered on top of the EU consumer-credit and unfair-terms directives.
• AMF Règlement Général and Doctrine — investment-services conduct rules and reporting.
• ACPR recommendations on complaints handling — the supervisor’s published expectations on how complaints must be received, tracked, resolved and reported.
• EU layer — PSD2 conduct provisions, the consumer-credit framework, and MiFID II / MiCA conduct rules for the AMF-supervised population.

3. Complaints reporting — structured data, not narrative

Typical fields per complaint in the supervisory roll-up:

• Customer category — consumer or professional
• Product or service category
• Channel of receipt
• Date received and date resolved
• Outcome — upheld, partially upheld, rejected, mediated
• Whether the customer escalated to a mediator
• Whether any remediation payment was made

Submission is annual or semi-annual depending on the supervisor and the firm’s size and activity. The structured data feeds directly into ACPR and AMF supervisory risk assessments: a firm whose complaint volume rises faster than its customer base, or whose resolution times drift, moves up the priority list for thematic work.

4. Worked example — an EME with rising complaint volumes

Facts: an e-money institution passported into France sees consumer complaints about blocked accounts double in a year, driven by tighter fraud rules. Average resolution time slips from three weeks to seven. The compliance team wonders whether to reclassify some cases as “enquiries” to flatten the numbers before the annual submission.

What the rule says: a complaint is any expression of dissatisfaction requiring a response — the classification test is substance, not label. The supervisory submission must reconcile with the internal case-management log, and supervisors sample underlying cases during inspections. Reclassifying genuine complaints as enquiries creates a gap between customer-facing reality and reported data.

What the practitioner does: reports the real numbers with a short accompanying explanation of the fraud-control driver, and fixes the operational cause — resourcing the unblocking workflow — rather than the statistic. A visible spike with a documented root cause is a manageable supervisory conversation; a massaged data set discovered on inspection is a conduct finding with governance implications.

5. The mediator regime

Mediation is a statutory part of the French retail landscape. The mechanism works in stages:

• The customer must first exhaust the firm’s internal complaint handling — the firm has a defined window to resolve (typically two months for consumer complaints).
• The mediator then investigates and proposes a non-binding resolution.
• The firm has a defined window to accept, reject or counter-propose.
• Outcomes feed the supervisor’s conduct data — patterns of adverse opinions are a supervisory signal, and mediators publish summary outcomes in annual reports.

6. Worked example — a run of adverse mediator opinions

Facts: a payment institution offering FX transfers to French consumers rejects a cluster of complaints about undisclosed margin on exchange rates. Six customers escalate to mediation; five opinions go against the firm. The firm, noting the opinions are non-binding, rejects them all.

What comes back: nothing is legally enforced — the opinions are indeed non-binding. But the pattern lands in the mediator’s published statistics and in the conduct data visible to the ACPR. A repeated fact pattern (price transparency in FX) plus systematic rejection of mediation is exactly the profile that triggers a thematic conduct inspection, and price-transparency failings also sit squarely in DGCCRF territory.

What the practitioner does: treats the five adverse opinions as a free root-cause analysis. The firm fixes the pre-contractual disclosure of the FX margin, remediates the six complainants, and documents the change. Accepting a mediator proposal costs the disputed amount; a conduct inspection costs a year of management time.

7. DGCCRF — the consumer-protection overlay

The DGCCRF is the market-surveillance authority for consumer protection across all sectors, financial services included. Its role overlaps with — but does not replace — ACPR and AMF supervision. DGCCRF interventions cluster around:

• Advertising practices and price transparency
• Unfair contractual terms (clauses abusives)
• Consumer-credit advertising and pre-contractual information
• Cross-selling and unsolicited offers
• Distance-selling rules under the Code de la consommation

The DGCCRF can impose its own administrative sanctions independently of the ACPR or AMF. The regimes coexist: a firm in scope of financial-services supervision faces both, and coordination on cross-cutting matters runs through the Pôle commun and bilateral channels.

8. Beyond complaints — conduct outcomes

Supervisors collect outcome data well beyond raw complaint counts:

• Suitability and appropriateness (MiFID II / MiCA) — sample assessments of customer-questionnaire outcomes
• Best execution — venue analysis and execution-quality metrics
• Marketing communications — sample review for consistency with MiCA, MiFID II and AMF Doctrine requirements
• Fee transparency — alignment between advertised fees and actual charges
• Vulnerable-customer outcomes — increasingly featured in ACPR thematic inspections

9. Cadence and channel

10. Reconciliation — where inspections bite

The complaints submission must reconcile against the firm’s internal case-management system. Inspectors sample underlying cases: a complaint logged internally but missing from the supervisory submission is a finding, and the reverse — a submission containing complaints absent from the internal log — is also a finding. The reconciliation should be run and evidenced every reporting cycle, not reconstructed when the inspection notice arrives.

FAQ

What to do, today

• Complaints lead: build the case-management system around the structured fields the supervisor wants — category, channel, resolution time, outcome — not free text.
• Compliance officer: reconcile the supervisory submission against the internal case log every cycle, and keep the evidence.
• COO: track mediator escalation patterns separately — escalation volume is itself a supervisory signal, and clusters of adverse opinions deserve root-cause treatment.
• Head of reporting: coordinate conduct reporting with the AML and prudential cycles so one audit trail covers all three at inspection.
• Everyone: watch the PSD3 / PSR package — the conduct provisions are being refreshed and the reporting framework will follow.

Related: EMI licence in France · AMF MiFID II investment firm · Conduct and complaints reporting Spain (DCMR) · Conduct complaints in Germany (BaFin) · PSD2 fraud reporting under Article 96(6) · Payment Accounts Directive — fees and switching