ASIC will be ‘easier to deal with, harder to avoid’: Chair

26 August 2026 00:10

ASIC will become “easier to deal with and harder to avoid” under the leadership of chair Sarah Court, who will on Wednesday tell the Centre for Economic Development of Australia that the regulator will act “at the right time” and address “the right risks” to build a more productive economy in an uncertain world.

“Becoming easier to deal with and harder to avoid comes down to three pillars: being more responsive, investing in earlier detection and prevention, and setting clear expectations, with targeted interventions and stronger consequences,” Court will say, according to extracts of her speech seen by Professional Planner.

To do that, ASIC has set five new strategic priorities for the year as part of its 2026-27 Corporate Plan.

The corporate regulator is “looking for risks to retirement savings earlier and supporting better retirement outcomes and superannuation member services”, the plan says, alongside setting clear expectations to improve outcomes for consumers and small business and delivering “stronger consequences for breaches of professional conduct and better access to reliable financial and business information”.

The remaining priorities cover effective, resilient and innovative operations across financial services and markets, and “strengthening integrity, transparency, and confidence across Australia’s public and private markets to ensure Australia remains an attractive place to invest and do business”.

“We are in one of the most disrupted decades our country and the world has experienced,” Court will say.

“In uncertain times like these – and when the economy is under pressure – the debate inevitably turns to the role of regulation.

Court will say that while she has “some sympathy” for observations that regulation prevents business from innovating and improving productivity, and that it is difficult to conclude that some regulations have a “material public benefit sufficient to outweigh their regulatory cost”, increased pressures “only serve to highlight the importance of ASIC’s role in regulation and enforcement”.   

“A regulator that can provide confidence to those who are doing, or trying to do, the right thing, while providing consequences to those who are not,” Court will say. ”A regulator in other words who is easier to deal with, and harder to avoid.

“That’s the kind of regulator that ASIC needs to be to help build a more productive economy in a more uncertain world.”

Advice and licensees

Under the new corporate plan, ASIC will identify AFS licensees using high-risk lead generation services and “take appropriate action to disrupt these models”, continuing the review of advice licensees announced in February, which has produced a list of lead generators, referral partners and the licensees that have acquired leads. ASIC added 19 entities to that list in June.

In her message accompanying the plan, Court said ASIC remains “determined to shut down unchecked avenues of misconduct outside the existing regulatory perimeter, including unlicensed lead generation in superannuation”.

The plan states digital marketing and lead generation channels “have the potential to allow coordinated misconduct across advisers and platforms with devastating results for retirement savings”.

ASIC will progress the next phase of its financial adviser qualifications compliance program, taking a risk-based approach to identify advisers who remain authorised to provide personal advice but have not met the qualifications standard. Innovation in advice is listed as a focus area under the retirement outcomes priority.

The regulator will also undertake a targeted review of superannuation trustees’ oversight of advice fee deductions, testing whether practices have lifted since Report 833, which reviewed six platform trustees holding more than $300 billion and found gaps in the monitoring of harmful advice fee deductions, unusual fee and investment patterns and high-risk switching. Where poor conduct is identified, the plan states, ASIC will take enforcement or other regulatory action.

Surveillance of licensees that recommend and offer separately managed accounts to retail clients will continue, in response to what the plan describes as rapid growth in advice to shift retail clients to SMAs, with a focus on governance frameworks, conflicts of interest and consumer outcomes. Surveillance of private credit fund distribution to retail clients through direct and advised channels will also continue.

asic, regulation, retirement savings, superannuation

One response to “ASIC will be ‘easier to deal with, harder to avoid’: Chair”

SONJA

August 27, 2026

Sarah Court’s promise of an ASIC that is “easier to deal with and harder to avoid” should be welcomed. But for the victims who have already paid the price for regulatory failure are indeed entitled to ask a much harder question: Why has it taken this long for ASIC to acknowledge that earlier detection, prevention, rapid escalation and timely intervention are fundamental to effective regulation?
These are not new expectations. They are the very things Australians reasonably believed their federal corporate regulator was already doing
For years, ASIC’s narrowing of investigations, closure of complaints, reliance on enforcement priorities and tendency toward intervention after collapse have done little for consumers whose money was still disappearing while regulatory decisions were being made, delayed or simply avoided.
Lion Property Group is a stark example. ASIC investigated the operation for years and concluded that investigation in June 2024. Within months, investor distributions had ceased. Investors subsequently had to fund their own Supreme Court proceedings, which resulted in findings that the arrangements constituted an unregistered managed investment scheme. It took the courts less that 3 hearings whilst ASIC spent 4 years investigating and was unable to even identify the AFSL requirement. ASIC later reopened an investigation. All too little far too late.
That history cannot simply be swept away by announcing a new regulatory era.
Nor should the experience of Shield and First Guardian/Falcon/AFL/Sterling/Prime Trust be reduced to the sanitised language of “investment losses”.
To be clear: where investor money has been misappropriated or obtained through alleged fraud, this is not simply capital lost through commercial risk or a market downturn. The critical regulatory question is what could have been detected, investigated and stopped before Australians’ retirement savings disappeared.
ASIC’s new emphasis on shortening the distance between risk and regulatory response is therefore significant. It implicitly recognises the very problem victims have been describing for years: when regulatory intervention comes only after the money is gone, regulation has failed at the point at which Australians were absoloutely entitled to and needed it most.
There must also be accountability for the past.
What information did ASIC have? What warnings were received? Why were investigations narrowed or closed? What statutory powers were available? Why were they not exercised? And critically, what harm might have been prevented had today’s promised approach been applied then?
These are legitimate questions of public administration. They are not attacks upon ASIC’s independence, nor requests for government to dictate the outcome of individual investigations.
Sarah Court deserves the opportunity to reform ASIC. But reform cannot become an institutional amnesty for what preceded it.

The Commonwealth cannot put ASIC in a new suit and pretend Australians were not devastated under the old one.
Australia’s financial system deserves a regulator, not a financial coroner — one that identifies serious misconduct while Australians can still be protected, rather than arriving after the financial wreckage to investigate what went wrong.
If this genuinely marks a new era for ASIC, then fixing the failures of the past must form part of it. Those Australians already harmed cannot simply be recorded as yesterday’s statistics while the regulator moves on.

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