Yesterday, ASIC released its updated Regulatory Guide 78 Breach reporting by AFS licensees and credit licensees (RG 78). Since the introduction of the new ASIC breach reporting regime on 1 October 2021, it is safe to say that there has been and continues to be confusion and ambiguity around the legal scope and practical operation … Read more

It’s time! We are excited to launch our brand new (and what we think is Australia’s first) ‘Breach Reporting Hotline’ service, which enables you to ‘bounce’ discrete queries off our team of experts as a way of cutting through some of the complexity that is intrinsic to this new regime. For more information, please see … Read more

The breach reporting regime continues to give rise to ambiguity for licensees. As we have commented previously, there continues to be a mismatch in breach reporting practices across the industry and ASIC expectations, as well as a divergence of breach reporting practices between licensees. A common area of over-reporting is in the context of reporting … Read more

The new best financial interests duty (BFID) for superannuation trustees should represent a pathway to improve the decision-making of the trustee to better, or at least more visibly, calibrate with the interests of the fund’s beneficiaries. In this, it seems, it should be a ‘beautiful’ thing. The problem which the superannuation industry has been confronting, … Read more

Our Financial Services Regulatory (FSR) team surveys the regulatory landscape for 2023 and considers the challenges confronting firms and regulators. Firms now face a maelstrom of risks as 2023 comes into view. Economic and geopolitical uncertainty has aggravated already rising interest rates and inflation, causing supply chain issues and increased volatility in the commodities and … Read more

The continuing uncertainty around the provision requiring licensees to provide financial services ‘efficiently, honestly and fairly’ under section 912A(1)(a) of the Corporations Act (EHF provision) comes into sharpest focus against the backdrop of the new breach reporting regime. In this article, we examine some common questions and challenges we are seeing emerge in relation to … Read more

On 27 October 2022, ASIC released its first publication of information lodged under the new breach reporting regime, Report 740 Insights from the reportable situations regime: October 2021 to June 2022 (Report 740). As readers will be aware, the new breach reporting regime for financial services came into effect on 1 October 2021, seeking to … Read more

On 20 October 2022, Herbert Smith Freehills published our sixth edition of the Global Bank Review: Banking on People. Against a backdrop of increased societal expectations, shifting employee priorities, reliance on technology and an uncertain economic outlook, ‘Banking on People’ delves deeper into the people-centric issues our banks clients are grappling with and explores the … Read more