Poland's KNF Keeps Its CFD Review Open — What Tighter Appropriateness Tests Would Mean for EU Traders

The Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) confirmed this week that its review of how contracts for difference are offered — by domestic firms and by brokers passporting in from elsewhere in the EU — remains active. Its communications director, Jacek Barszczewski, told the Polish site Strefa Inwestorów that “work in this area continues” and that the regulator will publish its conclusions once it is complete. The focus, as before, is on how firms test clients' knowledge, experience and understanding of risk. No consultation paper, draft rule or implementation date has been published.

The review first surfaced publicly in May, when KNF chairman Dariusz Adamski said access to complex, high-risk instruments was too easy and should be restricted for people who do not understand the risks. Markets read this week's reminder as a sign the pressure is not going away. Warsaw-listed XTB, the country's largest retail broker and a lightning rod for the whole debate, closed 4.1% lower at PLN 169.18 on Monday and traded near PLN 164.56 by late Tuesday morning — down a further 2.7% and nearly 7% below the previous Friday's close, underperforming the WIG20 index by about 5.2 percentage points over the two sessions. The context tempers the drama: the stock had risen 61.6% between 1 July and its 12 August close, so there was ample room for profit-taking, and peers moved the other way on Monday — Plus500 up 1.0%, IG Group 0.8%, CMC Markets 4.4% and Swissquote 1.0%.

Strip away the share price and the review is about one mechanism: the MiFID II appropriateness test. When a firm sells you a complex product like a CFD without giving advice, it must ask about your knowledge and experience and judge whether the product is appropriate. If it decides the product is not appropriate, it has to warn you — but it does not have to stop you. That warn-then-proceed design is the soft spot regulators keep circling: a questionnaire that is easy to pass, and a warning that most people click past, does little to protect the inexperienced trader it exists for. The KNF is asking whether the testing is rigorous enough to mean anything.

This is not an abstract worry for XTB. In March 2026 the KNF fined the broker PLN 20 million (about $5.5 million) over precisely this territory: deficiencies in client knowledge assessments, target-market controls and risk disclosures across parts of 2022 and 2023, including how it scored questionnaire answers and a list that highlighted high-performing clients. XTB has asked for the decision to be reconsidered and called the amount disproportionate, so the fine is not final; the sales review runs separately. The two threads meet at the same point — the moment a broker decides whether a retail client should be trading CFDs at all.

Poland would not be inventing anything by tightening here. Spain's CNMV went furthest in 2023 with a retail-distribution regime that reaches past the EU-wide baseline: restrictions on mass advertising, sponsorships, unsolicited sales calls, free or nominal-cost “training” used as a marketing hook, certain incentives and credit-card funding of accounts. The EU-wide measures — leverage caps, margin close-out, negative balance protection and standardised risk warnings — already apply across the bloc under ESMA's framework, which ESMA reinforced this year by reminding firms that some perpetual futures fall under the same CFD restrictions. A Polish move could borrow from Spain, design its own approach, or simply harden the appropriateness test. The KNF has named no model and set no date.

First, a regulator scrutinising a broker is not a reason to avoid that broker. Supervision is the system working. What matters is how a firm responds — whether it treats onboarding controls as a compliance cost to minimise or as a genuine filter. A broker being examined on its appropriateness process is arguably better understood than one that has never drawn a regulator's attention because no one has looked.

Second, judge the onboarding, not just the spread. A serious broker asks real questions about your experience, explains why a product might not suit you, and makes the risk warning hard to ignore rather than a formality. If you sailed through account opening for a leveraged product in two minutes without a single question about what you understood, that is not convenience — it is the exact weakness the KNF is investigating.

Third, the protections that matter are EU-wide, not Poland-specific. Wherever your broker is authorised in the EU or EEA, retail leverage caps, margin close-out, negative balance protection and standardised risk warnings already apply. A Polish tightening would raise the floor further in one market; it does not change the fact that the baseline is already there. The practical question is whether your broker clears that baseline comfortably and can evidence it.

Among the EU-authorised brokers we cover, the two below sit at instructive points: the KNF-regulated firm at the centre of this review, and a multi-jurisdiction house whose CySEC, BaFin and FCA licences show what layered oversight looks like in practice.