The Productivity Commission has released an issues paper inviting submissions on the criteria that should be used to assess the efficiency and competitiveness of Australias superannuation system This will be of interest not only to superannuation trustees but also to service providers including fund ...

ASIC is consulting on a new regulatory guide for providers of digital financial product advice or robo-advice The regulatory guide is intended to help new entrants and existing Australian financial services licence holders For new entrants and licensees needing a reminder there is a nice summary of ...

Last month we were fortunate enough to host Barney Frank co-architect of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act 2010 to discuss financial regulation reform Coincidentally a couple of weeks later we were treated to a presentation on US financial regulation reforms by a US ...

The Dodd Frank Act is a bit like the US financial system it is trying to regulate - vast complex and hard to wade through It creates a bunch of new regulators on top of what was already a pretty solid cast and gives them wide-ranging powers They can not only set capital and liquidity requirements ...

The Government has finally begun the process of implementing its policy on crowd-sourced equity funding CSEF by introducing a Bill and releasing draft exposure regulations late last year which envisage the establishment of a CSEF regime in Australia The Bill has been referred to the Senate Economics ...

Many of you will be familiar with the long and tortured history of fees and costs disclosure regulation in Australia. The most recent set of issues can be traced back to 2014 when ASIC tried to address what it considered to be gaps in and inconsistent application of the former regime ...

The Federal Government has proposed to introduce two new forms of collective investment vehicle – each a shiny, tax-neutral alternative to the unit trust. ...

In his recent Interim Report into Misconduct in the Banking Superannuation and Financial Services Industry Commissioner Hayne makes a lot of the duties of an Australian financial services licensee and an Australian credit licensee to provide financial services or credit activities as the case may be ...

In examining the topic of consumer lending the Commission considered issues arising from the sale of credit products ndash including residential mortgages car finance and credit cards - by reference to case studies involving the four major banks as well as Aussie Home Loans and Citi ...

Although the Commissioner says that the Royal Commission is part of the executive and not the judiciary and that he is therefore not able to make any findings of law he comes pretty close in his views in response to Round 2 And in some important respects those views do not correspond with ...