When is it fit and proper for ASIC to cancel licences?

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The ASIC Enforcement Review Taskforce released its third Position and Consultation paper in June 2017 (the Position Paper). The paper explores how to strengthen ASIC’s licensing powers. Over the next five posts

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13 Oct 2017

How to use customer information for marketing and referrals

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Organisations often want to use customer information for marketing and to pass it on to third parties with whom they have arrangements such as strategic alliances and referrals. Although it’s

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09 Oct 2017

Global regulation of ICOs

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In the past 2 months, waves of information have rolled in from global regulators about the legal status of ICOs – welcome news to the blockchain community which has been

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03 Oct 2017

Recruitment choices can affect your compliance

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Employing someone with a conviction or bankruptcy can jeopardise compliance with an Australian Financial Services (AFS) licensee’s obligations. ASIC can ban any person it considers to not be of ‘good

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13 Sep 2017

Licences and responsible managers for sale

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A thriving secondary market for AFS licences, credit licences and Responsible Managers exists in Australia. Foreign exchange businesses can command ludicrously high sums for AFS licences for these rare and hard-to-get authorisations.

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01 Sep 2017

ASIC’s user-pays regime increases licensee costs

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Since 1 July 2017, most businesses who are regulated by ASIC must pay a levy to fund ASIC’s work, a cost that was previously borne by taxpayers. Who must pay

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25 Aug 2017

3 tips to write an SOA your clients want to read

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Most clients don’t read Statements of Advice (SoA) because they are far too long. This renders them ineffective and exposes advisers to the risk that their client may not understand

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03 Jul 2017

Crowd sourced equity funding – a quick primer

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From 28 September 2017, a new source of capital will become available to unlisted businesses – funding by the ‘crowd’. That’s you and me, mums and dads, and of course,

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16 Jun 2017

MDA changes – what, when and who?

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How time has flown! We’re 6 months into the revised MDA services framework, but what with Christmas and all, we’ve not seen much evidence of MDA providers changing their processes.

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19 Apr 2017

Unfair financial services contracts

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“Unfair contract terms” was the hot topic of 2016. Businesses were warned to get their contracts reviewed, multiple articles were published explaining what an unfair contract term actually is, and

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06 Apr 2017