New transparency standards for CFAs: what changes for investors from October 2026
Starting October 1, 2026, the digital financial assets (DFA) market enters a new era of regulation. The regulator is introducing fundamentally different requirements for information disclosure, which radically changes the rules of the game for issuers and opens up access for investors to the data needed for a balanced risk assessment. This is an important step towards the institutionalization of a market that has long suffered from information asymmetry.
The main goal of the innovations is to provide market participants with objective tools for assessing the reliability of instruments before purchasing them. Now, in the documentation for each issue, the issuer is required to indicate the company's financial indicators based on its accounting statements. An alternative option is to provide a direct link to a resource where this information is published in the public domain. If the issuer has been assigned a credit rating, the investor will be informed of the website of the rating agency that conducted the assessment.
Enhanced Standards for Credit DFAs
Special attention is paid to instruments whose yield is tied to payments on bank loans. By purchasing such DFAs, the investor assumes the default risks that originally lay with the lender. To make these risks obvious, the issuing bank is required to describe the loan agreement in detail and disclose information about the borrower.
In a situation where the base is a set of loans, it will be necessary to provide its qualitative characteristics, list all significant borrowers, and indicate the share of overdue debt. Possessing such information allows the investor to take a balanced approach to purchasing such complex products. The regulator reminds that due to its special nature, this instrument is allowed to be purchased only by qualified market participants.
Expert Commentary: These changes are a long-awaited signal of market maturity. On the one hand, they protect retail investors from "toxic" assets, and on the other, they establish clear "rules of the game" for issuers. However, it is worth remembering that even the most detailed documentation does not guarantee profitability. The key risk remains the same: the quality of the underlying asset, whether it be a loan portfolio or the issuer's business. Investors will now have to learn to read these new DFA "passports," and this will become a new skill necessary for successful work in the market.