SEC prepares changes to crowdfunding rules: Chair Atkins confirms at Oct 27 meeting

An Oct. 14, 2026 notice said the SEC's Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee would meet on Oct. 27 to continue discussing IPO modernization and explore policy directions for Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF). At that meeting, Bloomberg Law reported SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the agency is working on changes to the crowdfunding rulebook as part of efforts to expand retail access to private markets. A day later, the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA) said it had presented four priorities for modernizing Reg CF at the meeting.

• The specific contents of the changes have not been published as a draft rule.
• It is unclear whether the crowdfunding changes travel with the IPO modernization package or stand alone.
• It is unclear how far obligations on funding portals would change.
• No official timetable for a proposed rule has been given.

Reg CF as designed is open only to issuers organized in the United States, so in practice it reaches Vietnamese startups that have already moved their holdco to the US and want to raise from the Vietnamese diaspora there. If the SEC loosens the rules, that door widens — but one technical risk should be handled first: hundreds of small investors sitting directly on the cap table will slow a Series A with a Singapore or Japanese fund, so pool them through an SPV from the start. Domestically, the US revision is a concrete reference for Vietnam's proposed crowdfunding sandbox: the part worth reading closely is how the SEC balances individual investment caps against disclosure duties for small issuers.