ASIC to focus on super, greenwashing, cyber in 2025
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The news: The corporate regulator has unveiled its enforcement priorities for 2025, with 12 key areas including a focus on the superannuation and insurance industries, greenwashing, and failures by financial licensee holders to have adequate cybersecurity protections in place.
The context: The announcement, made by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) deputy chair Sarah Court, comes just days after the regulator took legal action against superannuation fund Cbus and expressed concerns over systemic customer failings in the industry.
The regulator is expected to unveil crypto-related guidance before the end of the year, but has wrapped crypto industry enforcement into its "business as usual" priorities for 2025 following a number of cases over the past year that have tested how existing measures apply to crypto products.
In pursuing legal action over the next 12 months, Court said ASIC and other regulators, including the competitions regulator, remained concerned about the $4500 per day cap on what they can pay barristers compared with top barrister fees of up to $25,000 per day.
The fee caps have not been reviewed in more than a decade and while Court noted that ASIC worked with "terrific" barristers, the watchdog wanted the flexibility to bring a broader range of barristers to its cases and level the playing field with the "extensive legal resources" at the top end of town.
What they said: During a panel discussion at ASIC's annual forum today, Court was asked whether action against super eventually harms customer accounts and whether trustees should be held to the same account as directors of public companies.
Court said: "Trustees, [in our view], are no different from any other big end of town company. So, you know, we don't hear lots of people worrying about shareholders of banks when we sue banks and insurance companies and the like.
[The] second point is, it's up to superannuation trustees as to how they provide reserves and the extent of those reserves for compliance costs. And obviously they are a highly regulated sector by both ASIC and APRA [the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority].
"I think that the third point is, you know, we take these actions because we are trying to send a strong deterrent message to the sector more broadly, that it's simply unacceptable for these large trustees to fail to deliver to their members.
"... To your second question about the directors of trustees, again, ASIC's view is the directors that sit around superannuation trustee boards are in no different position than the directors of any other companies, and certainly, ASIC will always have an interest in that area."
The source: ASIC
