Our growth

When the AFM began, back in 2002, it had a workforce of around 200 people. Today, twenty years later, we have over 700 employees. So the AFM population has almost quadrupled. Why is that? There are several factors that have played a role. For example, the number of companies and sectors subject to our supervision has increased, and, due to technological advances, so has the number of disciplines – such as data analysis and behavioural sciences.

Scandals and new legislation generate growth

Many of those external events consisted of a scandal or a combination of scandals. Well-known examples include the accounting scandals at Ahold, ENRON and KPN Quest. In 2003, the year after we started operations, two affairs severely damaged public confidence, and the confidence of politicians, in the financial market: the Ahold affair and the share-leasing affair. This made it clear at a stroke why behavioural supervision is so important. From then on, more and more new tasks kept flowing to the AFM. It marked the start of our expansion.

In the years that followed, our powers were expanded to include supervision of audit firms, financial reporting, pensions and a large variety of investment options. At the same time, the capital market experienced a shift from self-regulation towards independent supervision in more and more areas. For instance, benchmarks were placed under supervision in the wake of the Libor scandal.

Woekerpolis affair

Another scandal that is still etched in the collective memory (at least in the Netherlands) and had an unmistakable impact on the AFM is the profiteering policies affair. In 2006, an AFM report revealed a variety of abuses in the sale of equity-linked policies. They were often overpriced, for example, and the sellers claimed much of the premium as costs without the consumer being aware. In addition to the huge effort it took to resolve this affair, it also triggered a call for more supervision of the insurance sector and of financial products in general.

Financial crisis

The collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September 2008 sparked off a global financial crisis that made the entire financial world shake on its foundations and, in the years that followed, spawned a large number of new – and often international – laws and regulations. The financial crisis also drove cross-border collaboration in supervision. Again, this generated further tasks for our organisation.

Interest rate derivatives

There was one scandal in which the AFM itself was involved in a negative sense. This concerned the practice among banks of selling interest rate derivatives to small entrepreneurs who had little to gain from them or were not sufficiently informed about the associated risks. We initially failed to grasp the scale and severity of this issue. Afterwards, we commissioned an external evaluation of the way we had handled this affair and tried to learn lessons for the future. On the AFM's advice, a uniform compensation scheme was used for all SMEs, irrespective of the bank they did business with. The AFM supervised this process, which eventually contributed to the payment of over 1.5 billion euros in compensation.

Public scrutiny helps us pursue our mission