ASIC Chair Joseph Longo revealed last week what we can expect from the regulator in the coming year – and it is going to be busy.
ASIC released its Corporate Plan for 2022-26 on 22 August 2022 followed by Mr Longo’s speech to the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) where he revealed his vision for ASIC to be an “ambitious and confident regulator”, focused on the future.
Resonating throughout the discussion was ASIC’s desire to prioritise areas of greatest harm and take action to protect vulnerable consumers. For Mr Longo, this means squarely dealing with “hot topic” issues like greenwashing, climate-risk disclosures, crypto-assets (or cryptocurrencies), scams and more.
We set out below some key take-homes from the Corporate Plan and comments from Mr Longo during his discussion at the CEDA event.
Strategic priorities and projects
ASIC has identified four external strategic priorities for the next 4 years:
- Product design and distribution;
- Sustainable finance;
- Retirement decision making; and
Mr Longo focused on ASIC’s approach to four of its eight core strategic projects to advance the strategic priorities:
- improving sustainable finance practices and disclosure of climate risks;
- supervising and enforcing the design and distribution obligations (DDO);
- addressing market integrity issues and investor harms in relation to crypto-assets (or cryptocurrency); and
- disrupting and combatting financial scams to protect consumers.
