Ten years into one of Europe's most closely watched regulatory dialogues on financial innovation, Bank for International Settlements-affiliated central banker Emmanuel Moulin, Governor of the Bank of France, took to the podium in Paris to mark a milestone that few early observers of the fintech sector would have predicted: a decade of sustained, structured engagement between France's top financial regulators and the industry they oversee. Speaking at the joint Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (ACPR) and Financial Markets Authority (AMF) Fintech Forum on 2 October 2026, Moulin framed his address around a deliberately spare architecture — one conviction, two principles, and three challenges — that speaks as much to the maturity of the conversation as to the complexity that remains ahead.
The ACPR-AMF Fintech Forum, now in its tenth year, has evolved from an exploratory gathering in the early days of mobile payments and peer-to-peer lending into a central venue for debating the structural questions that define European financial services: how to regulate artificial intelligence in credit decisioning, how to treat tokenized assets within existing prudential frameworks, and how to harmonize national supervisory approaches under the increasingly assertive architecture of European Union financial law. That a speech delivered at this forum is simultaneously published by the BIS underscores how far the Franco-European fintech regulatory conversation has traveled — from domestic curiosity to global reference point.
Moulin's choice to frame his remarks with a single organizing conviction before turning to principles and challenges is itself a signal worth parsing. In the register of central banking communication, conviction language is unusual. Governors typically traffic in assessments, outlooks, and calibrated uncertainties. When a sitting central bank governor declares a conviction in a public forum, the word carries institutional weight. It suggests not a forecast but a settled view — one that has been tested against evidence accumulated over the decade the forum itself has been running. While the precise content of that conviction, as reflected in the published record, reflects the broader arc of Moulin's regulatory philosophy, its very framing tells markets and industry participants that the Bank of France's approach to fintech supervision is not in flux; it is anchored.
The two principles referenced in the speech's structure are equally telling in their rhetorical positioning. Principles, in regulatory discourse, occupy the space between rigid rules and open-ended discretion. They are the architecture that allows supervisory frameworks to remain coherent as technology and business models evolve faster than legislation can track. For a forum that has spent ten years navigating exactly that tension — watching regulators at the ACPR and AMF adapt their toolkits to cover everything from initial coin offerings to embedded finance platforms — the invocation of principles rather than rules reflects hard-won institutional learning. Supervision that relies on bright-line rules alone will always lag innovation; supervision grounded in durable principles can keep pace without sacrificing consistency or legal certainty.
The three challenges Moulin identified constitute the forward-looking core of the anniversary address. Taken together, they map the terrain that French and European regulators must traverse over the coming decade. The fintech sector in 2026 is a qualitatively different animal from the one the ACPR-AMF forum was designed to engage with in 2016. The entry of large technology firms into financial services, the proliferation of stablecoins and tokenized deposits, the deployment of generative artificial intelligence across the full value chain of banking and insurance, and the geopolitical fragmentation of digital financial infrastructure — each of these developments poses supervisory questions that the original forum architecture could scarcely have anticipated. That Moulin chose to organize these pressures into three discrete challenges, rather than offering an exhaustive taxonomy of risks, signals a deliberate strategic focus: not every problem requires a new regulatory instrument, but some challenges are foundational enough to demand explicit acknowledgment at the highest level.
The forum's tenth anniversary also invites reflection on what a decade of structured regulatory-industry dialogue actually produces. The ACPR and AMF did not create the forum as a ceremonial exercise. Its practical outputs have included clearer licensing pathways for fintech entrants, early engagement mechanisms that allowed supervisors to understand emerging business models before they reached systemic scale, and a steady accumulation of supervisory expertise on technologies — distributed ledger, machine learning, open application programming interfaces — that did not appear in the standard training manuals of financial oversight. France's fintech ecosystem has benefited measurably from this proximity, gaining a degree of regulatory predictability that has supported both domestic growth and cross-border expansion within the European single market.
What This Means for European Fintech Regulation
Moulin's anniversary address at the ACPR-AMF forum carries implications that extend well beyond Paris. As the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation (MiCA) beds in and as the European Banking Authority (EBA) and European Central Bank (ECB) grapple with the supervisory consequences of tokenization and AI adoption across member states, France's decade of structured fintech engagement positions the Bank of France and its sister agencies as credible architects of the next phase of European financial oversight. The one-conviction, two-principles, three-challenges framework is not merely an anniversary speech device — it is a navigational template for regulators across the continent who are asking the same foundational questions about how to remain effective stewards of financial stability in a sector that has not stopped reinventing itself since the forum's inaugural edition a decade ago. The industry would do well to study both the structure and the substance of what Moulin chose to say — and what that choice reveals about where European supervision is headed.
Written by the editorial team — independent journalism powered by Codego Press.