← Regulators
MiCA EU 2023/1114 DORA EU 2022/2554 France

Who is the ACPR: France's prudential supervisor and stablecoin authority under MiCA

The ACPR is France's banking and insurance prudential supervisor, backed by the Banque de France — and, under MiCA, the authority that licenses stablecoin issuers. This guide covers what it does, its three decision-making bodies, the banks it has fined for money-laundering failures (including a €50 million penalty on La Banque Postale), who runs it, and its role under DORA — every fact sourced.

Published June 11, 2026 · Updated June 11, 2026 · 13 min read · 8 sources cited

If the AMF is the regulator a crypto exchange deals with, the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR) is the one a stablecoin issuer deals with. France’s banking and insurance prudential supervisor — the body that checks whether banks and insurers are financially sound — is backed by the central bank, the Banque de France, and under MiCA it is the authority that licenses the issuers of stablecoins. It is also a national competent authority under DORA for banks and insurers. This is a profile of what the ACPR is, how it is built, who runs it, how it divides crypto supervision with the AMF, and the banks it has fined. Every fact is sourced.

Quick facts

  • Full name: Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR) — France’s Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority
  • Role: France’s prudential supervisor of banks and insurers (it checks they are financially sound); the MiCA authority for stablecoin issuers (e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens); the anti-money-laundering supervisor for the banking sector; and a national competent authority under DORA
  • Backing: operates under the aegis of the Banque de France (the French central bank), which supplies its staff and resources (ACPR — About us)
  • Three decision-making bodies: a Supervisory College (Collège de supervision), a Resolution College (Collège de résolution) and a separate Sanctions Committee (Commission des sanctions) that alone imposes fines — all served by a single General Secretariat (ACPR — About us)
  • Founded: created by Ordinance No. 2010-76 of 21 January 2010 (as the “ACP”); became the ACPR on 26 July 2013 (Law No. 2013-672), when the bank-resolution function was added (ACPR — About us)
  • Chairman: the Governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau (Chairman ex officio); Vice-Chairman: Jean-Paul Faugère, reappointed for a second term in 2025 (ACPR)
  • Secretary General: Emmanuelle Assouan, in office since 2 March 2026 (ACPR — General Secretariat)
  • Staff: an annual average of 1,085 agents in 2024, provided by the Banque de France (ACPR, Annual Report 2024)
  • Under supervision (end-2024): 657 banking institutions and 639 insurance and reinsurance undertakings (ACPR, Annual Report 2024)
  • Largest sanction: €50 million on La Banque Postale (late 2018, money-laundering controls) — upheld by the Conseil d’État on 15 November 2019 (Conseil d’État, no. 428292)
  • Seat: 4 place de Budapest, Paris
  • Website: acpr.banque-france.fr

What the ACPR is — and what it is not

The ACPR is France’s prudential supervisor — the authority that checks whether banks, insurers and other financial institutions are financially sound (do they hold enough capital, can they pay what they owe). It operates under the aegis of the Banque de France, the central bank, which supplies its staff and resources (ACPR — About us). It was created in 2010 by merging France’s separate banking and insurance supervisors, and took on a bank-crisis resolution role in 2013 — the “R” in ACPR (more on what resolution means below).

What it is not:

  • It is not the markets regulator. Conduct, disclosure, CASP authorisation and market abuse are the AMF’s job. The ACPR is the prudential side — the soundness of the institution rather than the fairness of the market.
  • It is not the data protection authority. France’s GDPR regulator is the CNIL. The ACPR’s relevance for the verticals here is MiCA and DORA.

How the ACPR is built: supervisors, resolvers, and a separate judge

The ACPR runs on a General Secretariat — which groups all its operational departments — plus three decision-making bodies, each with a distinct job (ACPR — About us):

  • The Supervisory College (Collège de supervision) — the main decision body. It sets supervisory priorities, grants and withdraws authorisations, and decides whether to open a sanction case. It can sit in different formations (plenary, or sub-colleges specialised in banking or insurance), because a small mutual insurer and a global bank need different expertise.
  • The Resolution College (Collège de résolution) — handles resolution: the orderly wind-down of a failing bank or insurer so that its collapse does not freeze depositors, topple other firms, or land on the taxpayer. Think of it as the body that keeps a pre-written “living will” for each big institution and executes it if the firm fails. This role was added in 2013 for banks and extended to insurers in 2016.
  • The Sanctions Committee (Commission des sanctions) — a separate body that alone imposes penalties. Like the AMF, the ACPR deliberately splits investigating (the Supervisory College, which refers a case) from judging (the Sanctions Committee, which rules on it like a tribunal). That separation is why ACPR fines tend to hold up on appeal — as the €50 million La Banque Postale penalty did at the Conseil d’État.

This is the same prosecutor-and-judge separation the AMF uses, and for the same reason: the hands that supervise a bank should not also be the hands that punish it.

The ACPR under MiCA: the stablecoin authority

MiCA splits “stablecoins” into two regulated categories, and both are the ACPR’s responsibility in France:

  • E-money tokens (EMTs) — crypto-assets pegged to a single official currency (like a euro stablecoin);
  • Asset-referenced tokens (ARTs) — crypto-assets backed by a basket of assets or currencies.

Under MiCA, the issuers of these tokens must be authorised, and in France that authorisation runs through the ACPR — typically because such issuers are credit institutions or e-money institutions, which the ACPR already prudentially supervises. The ACPR also runs the anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing (AML/CFT) checks — verifying a firm cannot be used to launder dirty money or move funds to sanctioned actors — during the broader crypto-authorisation process, then shares its findings with the AMF, which grants the final CASP licence. So a stablecoin issuer answers primarily to the ACPR; a crypto exchange or custodian answers primarily to the AMF.

The ACPR under DORA

Under DORA, each financial entity is supervised by the national authority that already oversees it. The ACPR is therefore the DORA competent authority for banks and insurers — the institutions in its prudential remit — checking their digital operational resilience: ICT (information and communications technology) risk management, incident reporting and resilience testing. Investment firms, asset managers and CASPs fall to the AMF. The EU-level oversight of critical ICT providers sits with the three European Supervisory Authorities — see the DORA pillar and the EBA profile (the ACPR, as a banking supervisor, works closely with the EBA).

Who runs it

The ACPR has an unusual leadership structure that ties it directly to the central bank:

  • Chairman — the Governor of the Banque de France, ex officio. The current Governor, and therefore the ACPR’s Chairman, is François Villeroy de Galhau. Binding the chair to the central bank’s Governor is deliberate: prudential supervision and monetary stability are two sides of the same coin.
  • Vice-Chairman — chosen for insurance expertise. The current Vice-Chairman is Jean-Paul Faugère, reappointed for a second term in 2025 (ACPR). He handles much of the day-to-day chairing of the supervisory work.
  • Secretary General — runs the staff. The General Secretariat is led by the Secretary General, appointed by the Minister for the Economy on the Chair’s proposal. Since 2 March 2026 the post has been held by Emmanuelle Assouan (ACPR — General Secretariat).

Decisions are taken by the colleges, not by one person — the structure is built so no single official both supervises and sanctions the same firm.

From the ACP to the ACPR: a short history

The ACPR is younger than it looks: it was assembled in 2010 from four older bodies, then gained its resolution powers in stages (ACPR — About us).

  • 21 January 2010 — Ordinance No. 2010-76. France merged its separate banking and insurance authorisation and supervisory bodies — the CEA and CECEI (licensing) and the Banking Commission and ACAM (supervision) — into a single authority, the ACP (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel).
  • 9 March 2010 — the College’s first session. The new College, set up by then-Economy Minister Christine Lagarde, held its first plenary meeting.
  • 26 July 2013 — Law No. 2013-672 and the “R”. The banking separation and regulation act gave the ACP power to prevent and resolve banking crises. The authority became the ACPR — Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution.
  • December 2016 — resolution extended to insurance. The resolution powers added for banks in 2013 were extended to the insurance sector.
  • 2014–2015 — the Banking Union. Since the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) — the ECB-led system under which the euro area’s biggest banks are supervised jointly — started in 2014, and the Single Resolution Mechanism in 2015, the ACPR has carried out its banking supervision inside this European framework rather than alone.

The takeaway: when you read “ACP” in an older document, that is the same authority now called the ACPR.

Resources and 2024 in numbers

By EU standards the ACPR is large — far bigger than a typical data protection authority — because it supervises an entire banking and insurance sector. Its staff are supplied by the Banque de France, which is what lets a supervisor of this size operate (ACPR, Annual Report 2024):

  • An annual average of 1,085 agents in 2024.
  • 657 banking institutions and 639 insurance and reinsurance undertakings under supervision at end-2024 — the number of insurers fell by 21 over the year through consolidation (ACPR, Annual Report 2024).
  • In its published key figures the ACPR also reports 48 resolution plans adopted — the “living wills” for the institutions whose failure would matter most — and 97 on-site prudential inspections, supervisors physically going into firms to check the books rather than relying on filed reports alone (ACPR — About us, key figures).

The biggest French banking groups are supervised jointly with the ECB under the SSM; the ACPR supervises the smaller institutions directly and contributes to the joint supervision of the large ones.

The Sanctions Committee in action

The ACPR issues few sanctions, but heavy ones, and one theme dominates: anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist-financing (AML/CFT) failures — banks whose systems did not catch suspicious flows or did not enforce asset freezes (the legal duty to block the funds of anyone on a sanctions list). Three cases show the pattern and the scale.

La Banque Postale — €50 million (a record), late 2018. In its largest sanction ever, the Sanctions Committee fined La Banque Postale €50 million, plus a reprimand, for serious gaps in its money-laundering controls — in particular a failure to screen national “mandats cash” (instant cash-transfer) operations against asset-freeze lists, so that funds could move to or for people whose assets should have been blocked. La Banque Postale challenged the penalty; France’s highest administrative court, the Conseil d’État, upheld it on 15 November 2019 (no. 428292), ruling the fine proportionate and that AML compliance serves an overriding public interest (Conseil d’État no. 428292, via Actu-Juridique).

BRED — €2.5 million, 27 June 2024. The Sanctions Committee issued a reprimand and a €2.5 million fine to the Banque Régionale d’Escompte et de Dépôts (BRED) over significant deficiencies in its AML/CFT system (ACPR).

Banque Delubac et Cie — €600,000, 19 June 2025. The most recent case: a reprimand and a €600,000 fine over a transaction-monitoring system that missed atypical operations, slow handling of alerts, and accounts closed for money-laundering reasons without checking whether enhanced due diligence or a report to Tracfin (France’s financial-intelligence unit, which receives suspicious-transaction reports) was needed (ACPR).

The lesson for any institution the ACPR supervises is consistent: the costly failures are in the plumbing of financial-crime controls — transaction monitoring, alert handling and asset-freeze screening — not in headline solvency.

ACPR vs AMF — which French regulator is which

France’s two financial regulators divide the work, and crypto firms meet both:

  • ACPR — financial soundness (prudential supervision). Bank and insurer soundness, stablecoin (EMT/ART) issuers, AML/CFT. Backed by the Banque de France, chaired by its Governor. The “are you financially sound and not a laundering risk?” regulator.
  • AMF — markets and conduct. CASP authorisation, white papers, market abuse. Profiled at /regulators/france/amf. The “can you operate, and is your conduct sound?” regulator.

How to contact the ACPR

  • For supervised firms: banks, insurers and payment/e-money institutions deal with the ACPR through the General Secretariat’s departments and the Banque de France’s authorisation portals, reachable via acpr.banque-france.fr.
  • For consumers: the ACPR runs Assurance Banque Épargne Info Service (ABE IS), a joint public information service with the AMF for questions about banking, insurance and savings products.
  • Crypto authorisation (for firms): stablecoin (EMT/ART) issuers apply to the ACPR; CASP applications go through the AMF in coordination with the ACPR’s AML/CFT review.

What this means for you

  • If you issue a stablecoin (an EMT or ART) into France: the ACPR is your authority — and you will likely need to be, or be backed by, a credit or e-money institution it supervises.
  • If you run a crypto exchange or custody service: your lead is the AMF, but you will still pass through the ACPR’s AML/CFT checks during authorisation — the same controls whose failure produced La Banque Postale’s record fine.
  • If you are a bank or insurer under DORA: the ACPR is your DORA supervisor for ICT risk, incident reporting and resilience testing.
  • If you run financial-crime compliance at a French bank: the enforcement record is clear — the ACPR’s heaviest fines target AML/CFT plumbing (transaction monitoring, alert handling, asset-freeze screening), not abstract capital ratios.
  • If you are a journalist or researcher: “France’s prudential regulator” = the Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution (ACPR), created by Ordinance No. 2010-76 of 21 January 2010, backed by the Banque de France, chaired ex officio by its Governor François Villeroy de Galhau, with Vice-Chairman Jean-Paul Faugère and Secretary General Emmanuelle Assouan.

TL;DR

The ACPR (Autorité de contrôle prudentiel et de résolution) is France’s banking and insurance prudential supervisor — the body that checks financial soundness — operating under the aegis of the Banque de France with an annual average of about 1,085 staff. It was created by Ordinance No. 2010-76 of 21 January 2010 and gained its resolution role in 2013. It runs on three bodies kept deliberately apart: a Supervisory College, a Resolution College, and a separate Sanctions Committee that alone fines. Under MiCA it is France’s authority for stablecoin issuers — e-money tokens and asset-referenced tokens — and runs AML/CFT checks, while the AMF handles CASP authorisation. Under DORA it supervises banks and insurers. Its enforcement is low-volume but heavy and centred on anti-money-laundering failures: a record €50 million on La Banque Postale (2018, upheld by the Conseil d’État), €2.5 million on BRED (2024) and €600,000 on Banque Delubac (2025). Its Chairman is the Governor of the Banque de France, François Villeroy de Galhau, with Vice-Chairman Jean-Paul Faugère and Secretary General Emmanuelle Assouan (since 2 March 2026). France’s GDPR regulator is the separate CNIL.

Sources