Minister for Financial Services Stephen Jones has let financial advisers off the hook by scrapping a requirement that they must register individually with ASIC from 1 July next year.
Jones announced at the Professional Planner Advice Policy Summit in Canberra on Monday that the government will not proceed with stage two of the registration process for financial advisers, established by the Better Advice Act under the previous government.
“This stage would have required individual advisers to register with ASIC from the first of July 2026, on an ongoing annual basis,” Jones told the summit.
“Financial advisers are already registered by their authorising AFSL under Stage One. Not proceeding with Stage Two will retain this existing requirement but will remove an unnecessary additional regulatory burden on individual advisers. [It] would simply be an additional cost with no benefit to consumers.”
Just after the minister had finished addressing the summit, ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said the regulator wasn’t aware of the government’s plans, but it didn’t come as a surprise.
“I think a number of people around the industry have known that that was something that was on the way, and may well have been reconsidered,” Kirkland said.
“So that’s not surprising, in a way, that the government’s ultimately made a call not to proceed with that.”
Licensees were required to register financial advisers with ASIC by a deadline that was extended to 16 February 2024 from a date that originally fell in the Christmas/New Year holiday period.
The requirement was introduced in response to recommendation 2.10 of the Hayne royal commission and legislated in 2021. It is the licensee’s responsibility to ensure its authorised representatives are correctly and fully registered, with penalties for licensees and individual advisers alike if the deadline was missed.
Just over a year ago Kirkland told Professional Planner the regulator was “encouraged” by the rate of registrations, and with then less than a month before the extended deadline only 4000 registrations remained outstanding.
Kirkland told the Advice Policy Summit that ASIC is “happy to move with whatever policy decisions are made by the government”.
“But I think I would say that we really welcome the sustained effort by licensees to comply with Stage One requirements,” he said.
“I remember speaking to you [when] we initially had to extend the timeframe because we had some gaps in compliance, and we went out and we held roundtables, webinars, we provided updated guidance, and the industry really came to the party, and we had a really high rate of compliance by the revised timeline.
“I think that’s a really good example of how we can actually work together to support compliance.”
Good to see some common sense finally.
Unforgiveable of the Liberal Party to be so anti-small business and the advice industry – they simply love red-tape and bureaucracy.