Luxembourg’s top financial watchdog has blasted the clout of influencers and critiqued regulatory agencies’ own mastery of social media.

Claude Marx, director general of the Luxembourg Financial Sector Supervisory Commission (CSSF), called for increased financial education (“which starts at school”) to offset the increased popularity of social media influencers and personal finance influencers (known as “finfluencers”). The impact of influencers is “not easy to deal with,” said Marx, citing the example of Kim Kardashian, a celebrity, touting cryptocurrency on Instagram.

Marx was speaking at the 2024 Elvinger Hoss Annual Regulatory Forum, held at Mudam on 5 June 2024. The conference was mainly geared to legal and compliance professionals in the banking sector.

Consumers are not always equipped to evaluated influencers’ statements, Marx noted. But influencers are “a fact of life” and regulators have fallen short. Regulators are “not good at Youtube and even worse at Tiktok.... I wonder if we should pay influencers” to get proper financial messages out. Marx said he “only half joking” about hiring influencers because authorities “can’t expect customers to check” their own websites.

The conference opened with comments from Yves Stein, chair of the Luxembourg Bankers’ Association (ABBL) and CEO of Edmond de Rothschild Europe, who referenced the recent announcement by ING that it was abruptly dumping thousands of mass retail clients in Luxembourg. Stein commented dryly that there had been some “reshuffling in the retail banking market” but said he was pleased by the “very fast response by other players” in taking on customers who need to switch banks in a hurry.

Also speaking at the conference were Pit Reckinger, partner at Elvinger Hoss Prussen and president of the Luxembourg Bar; Henri Wagner, partner at Elvinger Hoss Prussen; Anne-George Kuzuhara, advisor at the finance ministry; Mark Tluszcz, co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners and chair of Wix; and Françoise Thoma, CEO of the state savings bank Spuerkeess.

The firm said that 121 people attended the Elvinger Hoss Annual Regulatory Forum in-person and Reckinger said in his remarks that there were about 200 more attendees online. He said the next edition of the conference, which will be the firm’s third, would take place on 4 June 2025.