With a Federal Election and multiple reviews in the industry that will be underway, 2022 will be a quiet year when it comes to regulatory change, according to the Financial Planning Association of Australia (FPA).
Ben Marshan, FPA head of policy, strategy and innovation, said things were already locked in from a regulatory change perspective.
Next year, Treasury would have its review into advice, which included the Life Insurance Framework review, and the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) would have its review of the Corporations Act.
“We’re not going to see a lot of regulatory change in 2022 because we have the reviews on, and we also have an election coming up, so 2022 is going to be fairly settled from a regulatory change perspective,” Marshan said.
“It gives us an opportunity to settle in, but we’ll get to the end of 2022 and we’re going to have more reports coming in which are going to say these are the improvements that need to be made around the regulation of financial advice to make it more accessible to consumers [and to] make sure it can be provided efficiently and affordably, but we won’t see any of that next year.
“It’s a massive opportunity in 2022 to look at your business, look at your processes, look at your clients and just settle things down and re-engineer the business the way that you need to make it work.”
With a Federal Election due, the country was most likely to see more consumer-focused issues for financial services, similar to the 2019 election which followed the conclusion of the Royal Commission.
“We’re going to see the election fought on consumer issues, so there are likely to be policy positions that the two main parties will take in relation to superannuation, taxation, property investments and things like that,” Marshan said.
“From that perspective, the focus is terms of the election and probably the budget and the outcome of the election is going to be focus on the advice we provide, not the way we provide advice.
“[This] is kind of where the last election was more fought in terms of the Royal Commission and implementing the Royal Commission [recommendations] because that was about how advice was provided, not how to fix clients.”
