The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has released its consultation on a new cross-industry prudential standard for operational risk management, CPS 230, which proposes to introduce a range of new requirements on APRA-regulated entities for managing operational risk and enhance existing requirements for business continuity and service provider management. Operational resilience is critical to the … Read more

For some time now, the issue of whether a sales representative can cross-position different insurance policies or financial products through the mechanism of a multi-policy or multi-product discount has been somewhat of a vexed issue – to say the least. In this context, we are referring to a scenario where a client makes an enquiry … Read more

Our Financial Services Regulatory team surveys the regulatory landscape for 2022 and identifies themes that we expect to be at the core of regulatory priorities globally over the next 12 months.  On 7 December 2021, HSF published its annual Financial Services Regulatory Outlook report surveying the global regulatory landscape for 2022 which addressed the following … Read more

On Friday 6 August 2021, Treasury registered the long-awaited anti-hawking regulations in relation to financial services, which can be found here. The Financial Sector Reform (Hayne Royal Commission Response) (Hawking of Financial Products) Regulations 2021 (Cth) operate to exempt certain conduct from the proposed anti-hawking prohibition coming into effect on 5 October 2021. Some key … Read more

This edition of our ‘FSR GPS’ (Guidelines, Principles and Strategies) series provides some insights on the requirement to report significant dealings to ASIC under the upcoming DDO regime, which is due to come into effect on 5 October 2021. Under the DDO regime, a product issuer has an obligation to report a ‘significant dealing’ to … Read more

We have previously written about our 12 principles that apply to the implementation of the new anti-hawking regime (NAHR), as well as some observations on the evolving structure of insurance contracts and distribution resulting from the NAHR. In this article, we make some further observations on the scope of an invitation, consent, causation, and the … Read more

On 16 July, Treasury released Exposure Draft legislation for the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR)(FAR Bill). While the FAR Bill has some similarities to the Banking Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR) in the Banking Act 1959 (Cth), there are some provisions of the FAR Bill which differ to BEAR and which raise concerns about over-regulation and uncertainty. … Read more

Following the publication of our principles on the new anti-hawking regime for financial products, we have been advising many life insurers and general insurers on their readiness for the new regime, due to come into effect on 5 October 2021. This is without a doubt one of the biggest reforms to impact the insurance industry … Read more