Distil the essence, says D’Aloisio

The new chairman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Tony D’Aloisio, has challenged the financial services to be more proactive in distilling the content of Product Disclosure Statements and delivering shorter documents.

In a panel session on the opening day of the Investment and Financial Services Association annual conference in Brisbane, D’Aloisio said every product had a set of benefits and risks and the challenge for the industry was distilling their essence.

He said financial services companies needed to explain what a product was and what they were seeking to achieve.

“The more you focus on the quality of advice and distil the essence then the easier it is,” D’Aloisio said.

He said that as a lawyer he was conscious of the impact of lengthy documents, but what worked was when lawyers really focused on what clients were trying to achieve.

“Documents need to be shorter, clearer and simpler. Where you have drafting by executive groups, lawyers etcetera you will get a lot of compromises and brevity and clarity falls away,” D’Aloisio said.

He said moving into the future, ASIC would be looking to assist the industry because it believed that the interests of consumers would be better served by documents that better distilled the essence of a product.