In short
- Advertisements need prior approval from the supervisory body
- Guaranteed returns and misleading testimonials are prohibited
- The market-risk warning has a fixed wording and a minimum type size
- Keep a copy of every advertisement for five years
If you are a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst, almost everything you publish that could influence an investment decision is an advertisement. The SEBI advertisement code set out in circular SEBI/HO/MIRSD/MIRSD-PoD-2/P/CIR/2023/51, dated 5 April 2023 and effective from 1 May 2023, governs it.
This is a working summary for people commissioning or writing that content. We are a content firm rather than a compliance consultancy, so treat it as orientation and take anything consequential to your compliance officer.
What counts as an advertisement
Far more than you would expect. The code reaches any communication that may influence investment decisions — pamphlets, research reports, newspaper pieces, electronic messages and social media among them. A WhatsApp forward and a LinkedIn post sit inside the same regime as a printed brochure.
What the code prohibits
- Guaranteed returns. Any promise of assured performance.
- Misleading or deceptive testimonials.
- Statements that are false, misleading, biased or deceptive, including those resting on assumptions or projections.
- Prize schemes. Games, schemes or competitions distributing prize money, medals or gifts.
- Dense technical or legal language used in place of clear explanation.
- Advertising while suspended by SEBI or the supervisory body, alone or jointly with another adviser or analyst.
The prohibition on assumptions and projections is the one that catches good writers unawares. A plausible, carefully hedged illustration of what a portfolio might do is still a projection, and the code does not make an exception for careful hedging.
What has to appear
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Identity | Registered name, registered office address, SEBI registration number, logo or trade name, and CIN where applicable |
| Accuracy | Information that is true and complete, in clear and concise language |
| Standard warning | “Investment in securities market are subject to market risks. Read all the related documents carefully before investing” — unaltered, minimum 10 point type, accurately translated if the advertisement is in another language |
| Disclaimer | That SEBI registration, BASL membership and NISM certification do not guarantee performance or assure returns |
| Short formats | Where an SMS, pop-up or social post cannot carry the details, a hyperlink to an official page that does |
Note the wording of the standard warning is fixed. It is reproduced above as the code gives it, grammatical oddity included, because altering it is itself a breach.
The two requirements everyone forgets
Prior approval. Advertisements must be approved by the SEBI-recognised supervisory body before issue — for investment advisers, BASL. This is a workflow problem rather than a writing problem, and it is where content calendars built for speed come apart. If your publishing process assumes same-day posting, it is not compatible with the code.
Record keeping. A copy of every advertisement must be retained for five years. That means a real archive, including the social posts, not a folder somebody meant to keep.
What this means for a content programme
- Build approval time into the calendar before you promise a cadence to anyone.
- Write performance discussion as history with full context, never as expectation.
- Keep a single approved boilerplate block for the warning and disclaimer, and never edit it in place.
- Archive everything as published, with dates, automatically rather than manually.
- Decide in advance who signs off, and do not let that be the writer.
The compensation for all this constraint is that the bar for useful financial writing is extremely low. When everyone is confined to the same disclaimers, the firms that explain things clearly stand out immediately — which is the argument we make on our BFSI and fintech page, and in financial content that builds trust.
A note on who carries the risk
The registration is yours. An agency that writes something non-compliant may owe you under a contract, but it is your registration that is exposed, and no marketing supplier will be standing next to you if it goes wrong.
So the useful question when hiring is not whether an agency has written for financial clients, but whether it can name the circular, describe the approval workflow, and tell you what it will refuse to write. If it cannot, you are the compliance function.