Checked against delivery

This year happens to be the 35^th anniversary of ASIC and the 20^th anniversary of ASIFMA. I really want to thank Peter Stein [CEO, ASIFMA]. We had a conversation quite a while ago about ASIFMA coming to Sydney to coincide with the APRC [Asia Pacific Regional Committee] meetings of IOSCO that occurred earlier this week.

So, I’m really delighted it all came together. It’s been a very busy and productive week. And I think it really shows the leadership that this region is capable of. And it’s leadership that we should be providing and not just wait for the US, Europe and other jurisdictions to do it for us.

Acknowledgement of Country

So, before I begin my formal remarks I would like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and their ongoing connection to and custodianship of the land on which we meet today, and to pay my respects to elders past and present.

I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people present today.

Introduction

At yesterday’s ASIC Symposium, I had the great privilege to hear from Nobel-Prize-winning economist Joel Mokyr.

His work as an economic historian displays an uncanny ability to find the lessons of the past and apply them in an astute way to economic observations about the present.

One such observation that stands out for me comes from his book, The Enlightened Economy, about Britain’s role in the Industrial Revolution. In his words:

“Economic growth is all about creative destruction, the continuous obsolescence of techniques and practices, artefacts and designs. […] Economic growth requires the social and political capabilities of the economy to adapt^[1].”

Mokyr’s point is simple: economic growth is not a given. It is the direct result of institutional, business, and social ‘creative destruction’. In other words, without constant adaptation and agility, even the greatest economic promise is hollow.

Today we’re here to talk about the renewed promise of Asia’s capital markets. But that promise is hollow if we don’t act now.

Together we stand at a crossroads: creative destruction in the pursuit of progress – or a forced retreat to the status quo.

More simply, we must innovate – or stagnate, and condemn ourselves to years of playing catch-up.

Which is why we must act now, and act together, to seize the opportunity.

ASIC’s role in promoting financial innovation

But first, let’s look at what that opportunity is.

ASIC supports open, robust, and competitive markets – where new innovations can compete for market share.

And ASIC wants to be backers, not blockers, of financial innovation.

This is why last year we launched a review of the ASIC Innovation Hub, which since 2015 has helped some 1,000 fintech and regtech businesses navigate Australia’s regulatory system.

The review is now complete. We took a clear-eyed look at its effectiveness in delivering support for innovation, and identified several areas where it can improve.

We also identified several areas where ASIC will take the lead on navigating the structural change that system-wide innovation brings, so that Australia’s markets are fit for the future.

For the last decade, we’ve run regulatory sandboxes, and currently we’re assisting an independent review of the Government’s Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox to determine how well it supports financial innovation compared to international peers, like Singapore and the UK.

One of the primary concerns we heard from industry in both our review, and the Government’s, is about the pathway from sandbox to licensing: it needs to be far clearer, with more options.

In the last five years, very few sandbox participants have successfully made this transition. What happens is many get to the end of the testing period and face a cliff: full licence or stop operating. There’s no in between.

We’re interested in exploring how we can better support the transition to full licensing – similar to some overseas models.

Imagine a potential model where a start-up enters the regulatory sandbox to test an AI-driven financial advice tool. From day one, ASIC briefs them on the broader regulatory regime, including the licences available for financial and credit services. ASIC assigns the start-up a ‘case manager’ to help them personally navigate the experience.

At the end of year one, and a year before testing is over, they meet with ASIC to discuss their ‘exit strategy’. Do they intend to apply for a licence – and perhaps need relief to facilitate their transition? Or will they become a representative of an existing licensee, sell their business into a bigger licensed firm or wind up because testing hasn’t demonstrated commercial viability?

We think that this is a model that would better help manage the cliff that many start-ups face.

Beyond this work, we have also been a key part of the Reserve Bank’s Project Acacia^[2], which I know has been mentioned a few times this week, a project – some might even say a sandbox – that is testing tokenised wholesale asset markets, including enabling digital money in a range of forms to move swiftly and securely.

This has been a very effective public and private collaboration for testing innovation and exploring future wholesale market models outside the Government’s official regulatory sandbox. In our submission to the Government’s sandbox review, we said that there would be great value in more thematic sandboxes in the future, including an arrangement similar to Project Acacia – and so we’re exploring further work in this space with our public sector partners.

Project Acacia has provided a bit of a window to the future – in how financial market infrastructure might evolve, and the challenges and opportunities that will bring.

The Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre highlighted one such opportunity this week – to the tune of $24 billion. A handsome sum of money. But they made it clear that this opportunity could only come about if Australia starts to modernise and strengthen its financial system infrastructure through technologies like tokenisation^[3].

And only if the public and private sector work together. And only if regulatory and policy settings enable innovation.

They’re three big 'ifs'. Because the current path only projects about $1 billion per year in economic gains by 2030. So, there’s work ahead of us.

This is why we are bringing industry and experts together. One of our first steps will be to convene a roundtable of senior financial market experts and practitioners, to work with us on future regulatory models.

Tokenisation is a significant evolution in financial market infrastructure, with great potential, but we don’t yet know how well it performs at scale against other models.

In Australia, we have to move beyond pilots and proof-of-concept trials, to roll-outs at meaningful scale.

This said, ASIC has licensed FCX to trade and settle shares in private companies and units in managed investment schemes. This makes it one of the first licenced tokenised markets in the world.

And ASIC has also granted licences to a number of firms to provide tokenised assets and stablecoins.

Tokenisation at scale will require the cooperation and coordinated efforts of buy and sell side participants, market infrastructure and service providers, and policy-makers and regulators. This is definitely a team sport.

This is why ASIC has commissioned research on whether there are any regulatory and legal barriers to asset tokenisation, and what, if anything, we may need to do to facilitate further development.

We see this research as a launchpad into a broader conversation, so we also expect to convene an industry and expert roundtable in May to help us progress these issues when this work is complete.

ASIC also continues to work closely with Treasury on how proposed digital asset and payment services law reforms might be implemented, so that businesses in these sectors can continue to innovate with confidence.

These reforms are far-reaching and will require close engagement and considerable work – from industry and ASIC. Which is why – once again – we will initiate consultation with industry and form a new advisory group to support our implementation work^[4].

We’ve also commissioned a scan of innovation in international financial markets to identify where ASIC might be more proactive in seizing opportunities around innovation.

We’ll have more say on ASIC’s research, our new roundtables and our innovation work generally, in the coming months.

Embracing innovation across the Asia Pacific

Of course, for over a decade, Asia has been an epicentre of fast-moving innovation, fuelled by demographic shifts and mobile-first expansion.

Supportive government policy has strongly contributed, with Singapore, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia and Thailand all running sandboxes to encourage financial sector innovation.

Last year, Singapore celebrated its 10^th Fintech Festival – another birthday – and has emerged as one of the world’s leading fintech hubs, and today has more than 1,800 fintech firms^[5]. The fintech sector has matured across the region more broadly, and continues to attract significant investment with payments the top funded fintech category in ASEAN last year^[6].

AI is driving fintech’s evolution – and more broadly some of the most significant and powerful changes we are seeing around the world. Dario Amodei’s recent essay highlights how AI, in particular agentic AI, has the potential to accelerate the exponential ascent of technology,^[7]– I always thought that was a pretty good way of putting it – by working autonomously to not only execute, but plan tasks. This has the potential to level the playing field in favour of consumers – to help them navigate the complexity of the financial services industry and shop around to find the best deal for them.

Major Singaporean banks like OCBC and DBS are embracing AI, using AI models to generate economic value and enhance customer experiences^[8]. In Australia too, our banks are embracing AI – with ASIC’s support and supervision.

Tokenisation in Asia continues to be a focus of significant collaboration and learning.

Hong Kong recently launched its next phase of Project Ensemble to pilot real-value transactions involving tokenised deposits and digital assets during 2026.

And since 2022 Singapore’s Project Guardian has brought together more than 40 participants across the financial services industry to explore tokenisation of different asset types.

In quantum computing we’re seeing investment across the Asia Pacific. Japan’s Government declared 2025 as the first year of ‘quantum industrialisation’ and invested more than $7 billion in the sector^[9].

In Australia, federal and state governments have invested $2 billion, complemented by private investment^[10].

At ASIC, we are actively assessing the risks that future advances in quantum computing may pose to traditional encryption, including mapping our own cryptographic environment.

In parallel, we are piloting access to advanced supercomputing infrastructure, working with the University of Technology Sydney’s Human Technology Institute and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre based in Perth, Western Australia^[11]. We’re exploring early signal intelligence in life insurance claims and disputes, which is a deliberate and necessary step in safely and responsibly using quantum capabilities.

The way forward

All this speaks to a region choosing to innovate rather than stagnate – and technology is a key enabler.

But so is:

1. competition
2. simple and effective regulation, and
3. collaboration.

Let’s look at support for competition. Innovation isn’t just technology. It’s new products, new services, and business models that better meet people's needs and the needs of the market – often driven by new technology. This kind of innovation creates healthy competition to improve outcomes for consumers and investors.

And for capital markets, competition brings innovation, resilience, greater liquidity, greater participation and hopefully at lower costs^[12].

But some prefer the status quo.

Which brings me to regulation. In response to competition and innovation, some turn to regulators to preserve the status quo. This is why regulation is sometimes considered a handbrake on innovation.

Yet, regulation can be an enabler. For example, last year ASIC clarified how existing law applies to digital assets, providing investors improved protections and enabling companies to innovate more confidently. And we’ve seen a marked uptick in licence inquiries and applications since then.

But without collaboration across regulators and jurisdictions, fragmented regulatory standards will likely hold the region back as a whole.

As APAC jurisdictions advance their respective regulatory frameworks across the areas of innovation that I’ve outlined, there is a danger this may create a patchwork of standards and siloed networks. This could open the door to the kind of ‘regulatory arbitrage’ ASIC has heard about, unfortunately more than once, in our consultations.

Of course, rules and regulations will never be harmonised across all jurisdictions – nor am I suggesting that they should be.

But collaboration can help create common regulatory standards and approaches that facilitate innovative cross-border initiatives to benefit the region^[13].

And to advance this, ASIC has been very pleased to host IOSCO’s Asia Pacific Regional Committee of regulators during the past few days in Sydney. The agenda was dominated by discussion around technology, innovation and the future of finance.

We can’t do it alone

To conclude, we have an opportunity before us as a region. As part of that opportunity, Australia is open for business and investment from local and regional players. And ASIC is here to help clear the way.

But we can’t do it alone^[14].

Which is why ASIC is taking the lead to bring industry and experts together on the ecosystem-level around innovation. Like financial market infrastructure and asset tokenisation.

This is the kind of innovation that no one firm, or regulator, can progress alone, so everyone needs to play their part.

We need fresh thinking. We need smart risk-taking. We need collaboration across the private and public sector, and for boards and executives to play a strong role in driving innovation.

Backing untested innovation means being prepared to take risks.

This is how we modernise and strengthen our markets.

We can only achieve this together, across the Asia Pacific – and the opportunity is now.

Thank you for your attention.

^[1] Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850, (Penguin Books, 2011, first published by Yale University Press, 2009), Kindle Edition, Ch. 19.

^[2] Reserve Bank of Australia, “Project Acacia: RBA and DFCRC announce chosen industry participants and ASIC provides regulatory relief for tokenised asset settlement research project”, Media release, 10 July 2025

^[3] The Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre, “Unlocking Australia’s $24b Digital Finance Opportunity; the Economic Impact Potential of Digital Finance Innovation in Australia Report,” 3 March 2026.

^[4] Subject to the proposed laws passing Parliament.

^[5] Chia Der Jiun, Monetary Authority of Singapore, "Creating the Future of Finance: A Journey of Innovation and Collaboration", Speech, Singapore Fintech Festival 2025, 13 November 2025

^[6] FinTech in ASEAN 2025: Navigating the New Realities

^[7] Dario Amodei, "The Adolescence of Technology”, January 2026.

^[8] DBS, “DBS named World’s Best AI Bank”, Media Release, 15 October 2025.

^[9] Henning Soller, Duc Nam Nguyen, & Martina Gschwendtner, “Quantum technology investment opportunities” McKinsey & Company, 27 October 2025 (reference is to USD).

^[10] Australia Positioned to Lead Global Quantum Race with $2 Billion Investment — Quantum Australia

^[11] The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is an unincorporated joint venture between CSIRO, Curtin University, Murdoch University and The University of Western Australia (core members) and Edith Cowan University (founding associate member). It is supported by the Western Australian and Federal governments.

^[12] ASIC, “Cboe Global Markets decision”, Media release (25-261MR), 1 November 2025

^[13] ASIC’s work on foreign financial service providers is one example of this. Cf. Information Sheet 157 Foreign financial services providers: Licensing relief (INFO 157) and ASIC extends transitional relief for foreign financial services providers

^[14] In other words, collaboration goes beyond regulators and governments alone. As Mokyr put it, in the Industrial Revolution “the beliefs of rulers and policy makers, those who wrote the rules and regulations by which the economic game was played, were crucial. But… the beliefs and ideas of intellectuals, scientists, skilled mechanics, inventors, and entrepreneurs may have mattered more.” Cf. Joel Mokyr, op. cit., “Introduction: Ideology, Knowledge, and Institutions in Economic Change”.