Check against delivery

Good morning.

I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and by paying respects to elders past and present and I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the room with us today.

When I spoke here last year, I talked about how consumers in the financial system are often vulnerable to exploitation because in almost every decision they make, they’re equipped with less knowledge than the person or the firm on the other side of the transaction.

ASIC’s work in the past year has continued to reinforce this point.

We saw it in our review of mortgage offset accounts, where customers were potentially paying more interest than they should because of banks’ failures to properly set up, monitor or manage offset accounts.

We saw it in our review of car insurance, where customers were in the dark as to why their premiums were rising sharply and repeatedly.

And we saw it in our review of cash settlements in home insurance claims, where many offers were based on quotes from insurers’ preferred suppliers.

Different products, different circumstances, but they underscore the same point:

In a financial system that is becoming harder to navigate, financial wellbeing can’t depend on consumers simply getting better at navigating complexity.

We need to reduce the risk of harm, provide trusted help when people need it, and understand what actually helps people to make better decisions.

And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about today.

The new consumer environment

For a long time, financial capability was largely framed as an ‘information problem’: if people had access to the right information, they’d be better equipped to make good decisions.

I think that everybody in this room recognises that the challenge is more complicated than that.

Consumers today have access to more financial information than ever before. The problem is knowing what and who to trust.

Information comes at consumers from every direction - from social media, targeted advertising, influencers and increasingly AI. And the line between information, marketing and advice is not always obvious.

Scams are becoming increasingly hard to spot.

ASIC is seeing that with the increasing number of pump and dump schemes reported to us, where scammers are often using AI-generated, deep fake videos of well-known personalities and fake news sites to promote investments.

So, a question for all of us to consider is: how do we help people distinguish information that serves them, from information designed to manipulate them?

Adding to the complexity of the issue is the fact that many consumers have a level of anxiety about their financial future and are actively looking for guidance on how they can improve their financial security.

This creates an environment where there is an increased risk of consumer harm, and where we need to work even harder to help people to find their way to information they can trust.

Moneysmart as a trusted source

Moneysmart remains the pre-eminent destination for those seeking trusted financial advice, guidance and resources on a broad range of products and issues.

But in the era of AI, consumers are increasingly not ending up in destinations like Moneysmart but instead are being served AI-generated answers on their phones.

It’s the latest iteration of what has been a changing information landscape since the advent of search engines.

For ASIC, it means doubling down on our strategy of ‘meeting people where they are’, but we are competing with an ecosystem that is pumping out content – some valuable, lots harmful - at scale.

That means that building financial capability increasingly involves building digital financial literacy – the ability to distinguish between different information sources, separate truth from hype, and understand the strengths and weaknesses of AI tools.

It also means working closely with key stakeholders, especially when it comes to assisting consumers who have suffered financial harm.

A current example of this is our work to engage with consumers affected by the Shield and First Guardian collapses which the Minister mentioned earlier.

This is no small task. Over 11,000 people lost money through these collapses – with some having lost their entire retirement savings.

Many only invested after being convinced to move their super by lead generators, who often obtained consumers’ details via social media ads that purported to offer ‘free super reviews’ or ‘super health checks’.

A key goal of our communications has been to encourage those affected to lodge complaints with AFCA because for many, that may be the only pathway to compensation.

At the same time, we have been using every opportunity to warn other consumers how to avoid falling victim to the same harmful lead generation techniques.

While our work is far from done, we have learned some valuable lessons.

There are three in particular that I’d like to call out.

Firstly, we need to communicate harm in ways that reflect consumers’ actual experiences.

In our early communications relating to Shield and First Guardian, we described ‘high pressure sales tactics’ that were being used to convince people to switch their super into high-risk investments.

While our investigations have shown that warning was well-founded, feedback from investors suggested that it didn’t accurately describe what had happened to them.

I’ve listened to many of the call recordings that we’ve gathered in our work and they weren’t overtly high-pressure. They came across as friendly, helpful and informed. They were certainly persuasive but in a gently persistent, rather than pushy, manner.

Adopting different language in our communications has meant that our messages resonate better with those affected, as well as providing better and more effective warnings to others who may be potential victims.

Secondly, steps that seem simple to all of us (like lodging a complaint) can feel complex and overwhelming to consumers - especially those who have experienced a traumatic event.

Back in February, less than 2,000 of the 11,000 investors had lodged a complaint and that number has now doubled to around 4,000.

Through the 14 rounds of emails and direct mail we have sent to various groups of investors, we’ve come to realise that rather than focusing on bombarding people with information on their rights, we need to make taking that first step as simple as possible.

For many Shield and First Guardian investors, the business models were so complex, that they didn’t know who they should lodge a complaint against or for what reason. It was important for us to make the process as easy as possible.

And that brings me to my third insight – that we cannot do it alone, particularly in situations where so many people are affected.

For Shield and First Guardian, we have worked closely with Super Consumers Australia, who have set up a dedicated website that provides simple, easy-to-digest information on what happened, how to make a complaint and how they may be able to get some money back.

Importantly, this includes an easy-to-use, partially pre-filled complaints form that allows people to simply tick boxes in key areas, rather than working out what they need to say.

This is work that is more easily done by a consumer organisation than a regulator, and it’s played an important role in lifting the complaint numbers.

The other thing that we have done through the process is keep in contact with key investor representatives, who have told us what sorts of questions investors need answered, and when our communications were not hitting the mark.

This is not an approach that we can take in response to every fund collapse, but the extraordinary circumstances of Shield and First Guardian required extraordinary responses, and the lessons we’ve learned will be useful in a range of our other financial literacy work.

Getting better at knowing what works

Which leads me to my final point:

We need to get better at understanding what works and we need to find new ways of engaging with consumers.

Over the past year, we’ve completely revamped the Moneysmart website and built a high-quality social media presence.

In the age of AI summaries, we can no longer rely on the old metrics of hits to a website or advertisement reach as a marker of success.

Instead, we need to embrace the harder and more important challenge of changing behaviour, and measuring whether we are succeeding.

That is the key driver behind research we have done with RMIT to develop a financial wellbeing index which we intend to use to measure behavioural change.

And it’s also the reason that ASIC supported Australia's participation in the OECD Adult Financial Literacy Survey – which was informed by the clear support for that step in the room at last year’s summit.

ASIC regards sharing research and insights with the broader financial wellbeing community as an important part of our role, recognising that the goal of building financial capability is shared by people working across government, the community sector and industry.

We’re planning an insight sharing session for early 2027 where we’ll share the results of the OECD survey. If you’d like to know more about the financial wellbeing index or the OECD survey in the meantime, please speak to Jackson Hewett or Andrew Dadswell who are both here today.

Conclusion

If there’s one thought I’d like to leave you with today, it’s this: Financial wellbeing isn’t just about putting more information into the system.

It’s about understanding what helps people to make better decisions, giving them trusted places to turn, and designing a financial system that supports rather than tests their ability to navigate it.

ASIC looks forward to working with all of you to do just that.