The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) has announced it will recalibrate its regulatory priorities to focus on COVID-19 challenges, suspending all not time-critical matters such as the consultation paper on managed discretionary accounts (MDAs), among others.
The regulator said it would afford priority to ‘other matters’ with regards to where there would be the risk of significant consumer harm, serious breaches of the law and risk to both market integrity and time-critical matters.
This means it would suspend a number of not time-critical near-term activities such as consultation, regulatory reports and reviews, including executive remuneration, updated internal dispute resolution guidance and a consultation paper on managed discretionary accounts (MDAs), among others.
“ASIC is committed to working constructively and pragmatically with the firms we regulate, mindful they may encounter difficulties in complying with their regulatory obligations due to the impact of COVID-19,” the regulator said in the announcement.
ASIC would also suspend its enhanced onsite supervisory work such as the Close and Continuous Monitoring Program but it would work with financial institutions to further accelerate the payment of outstanding remediation to customers and would take account of the circumstances in which lenders, acting reasonably, are currently operating when administering the law.
“ASIC will maintain its enforcement activities and continue to investigate and take action where the public interest warrants us to do so against any person or entity that breaks the law,” the regulator said.
“However, it will focus on action necessary to prevent immediate consumer harm, egregious illegal conduct and other time critical matters.”
Comments
No mention of abandoning or softening their proposed annual Opt-In legislation. Sounds like they want to push ahead with making ongoing service fees as unworkable as possible for both advisers & consumers. This will prevent ever more consumers from accessing advice, at a time when they need it most.
Who is stopping ASIC from causing consumer harm?
you think people are going to care about signing an opt in form within 30 or 60 days because i have to comply with the fucking law.
in normal circumstances, sure, but with what we are going through no way, they won't bother, it's one last thing that they will want to do, so i will have to cancel myself as their adviser.
i am just going to give them asic's email and number and ask them to call them for help. it's up to asic to help them now
also asic's head office address so they can all line up there to hurl abuse at these fucking assholes.
Maybe ASICk joke as a priority should focus on ISA & IFM and how their funds are likely to be frozen due to the insane over-allocation to unlisted assets with artificially high valuations, and now won't have the liquidity to be able to provide the $10k relief measures that their members need...
I've also found the grammatical error in ISA advertising: "Not for profit member funds' was clearly a typo. The original union written text was "Not for member profit funds".
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