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Acknowledgements

I would like to begin by acknowledging the Gimuy Walubarra Yidinji people and their ongoing connection to and custodianship of the lands on which we meet today.

I pay my respects to elders past and present and I extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people present here today in this room.

Introduction

After a series of sudden global shocks, the economic outlook is fragile. International law is fracturing, and states are pivoting towards nationalist populism and strongman politics.^[1] There is widespread anxiety about machines replacing human labour, and wealth inequality is at an all-time high^[2].

I’m talking, of course, about the period surrounding the 1929 stock market crash. But it would be reasonable to assume that I was actually talking about today.

By 1933, the Great Depression had reached its lowest point in the United States. The economy was in full retreat. Bank failures numbered in the thousands, unemployment stood at 25%, and shantytowns dotted the landscape.

Now then, few people at this point had ever heard of Ferdinand Pecora, another great Italian. The Sicilian immigrant was one of only a small minority of Italian lawyers working in 1930s New York. People whose surnames ended in vowels didn’t often feature in newsprint alongside the titans of finance at that time. But after leading a public inquiry into the causes of the 1929 stock market crash, he became a near-daily fixture in newspapers and on radio broadcasts, and earned the nickname ‘the Hellhound of Wall Street’.

His highly publicised investigation led to resignations, firings, and even jail sentences. It spurred reforms that still live on today through the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) – ASIC’s counterpart. And most importantly, it helped to reignite confidence in a financial system that had fundamentally let people down^[3].

That is the power of public accountability. And that the approach I have tried to champion together with all my commissioners, in my term as ASIC Chair. An approach that I hope has been welcome to those of you who work on the front line of financial vulnerability. And today I will argue that in a volatile world, regulators cannot afford to work from behind closed doors. They must be active, they must be ambitious, and show that they are onto it. That’s how people can have confidence that the system is working as it should. I will also share how ASIC is transforming to be that kind of regulator. I will outline the challenges ahead, and how we can keep working together to protect Australians.

Where we started

But first, let’s reflect on where we started.

You might not be aware that ASIC is celebrating a significant birthday this year. It has been 35 years since we commenced operations as the Australian Securities Commission or the ASC (the ‘I’ would come much later).^[4]

ASIC was born in the shadow of an economic downturn, and after an extraordinary series of egregious corporate failures. The 1980s wasn’t called the ‘decade of greed’ for nothing. This was the era of Bond and Skase, of boom and bankruptcy.

Some of you may recall that prior to the creation of ASIC, corporate regulation was the domain of the states and territories. Corporate registrars, as they were known, operated, and I quote as, “as purely administrative bodies, never considering that they had any significant function in respect to regulation”.^[5]

Even the National Companies and Securities Commission (NCSC) – a progenitor of ASIC – was required to delegate its functions as far as possible to the existing state or territory offices^[6] and they operated on the budget of a small independent film^[7].

It took more than a century to institute a truly national system of corporate regulation, despite numerous attempts to do so – each precipitated by a similar cycle of corporate collapses and loss of public confidence.^[8]

I want to pause here for a moment to reflect on what that meant. Confidence is the true currency of the financial system. Without it, the system just doesn’t work as intended. Consider a bank scam victim who refuses to transact online after their money was stolen. Or a natural disaster survivor who opts out of insurance entirely after their claim is unfairly rejected. The people in this room know all too well what that broken trust looks like. It walks through your doors every day. So, maintaining confidence in the financial system is key, and Australia needed a corporate regulator that could do that.  

Where we are today

Which brings us to today.

The ASIC of today is very different to the ASC established in 1991. We now regulate millions of entities across multiple sectors of our economy.

Importantly, in 1998 we assumed regulatory responsibility for consumer protection in financial services – the same year that we got the ‘I’ in our name – and in 2010, we took on regulation of consumer credit. So, our remit spans not only corporations, but insurance and superannuation, credit and banking, financial advice and much more.

This system-wide reach enables us to promote fair and efficient outcomes, wherever Australians interact with the financial system. 

During my tenure as Chair, ASIC has undertaken a significant organisational restructure to become a modern, confident and ambitious regulator.

Modern, because we have prioritised data and technology to keep pace with a fast‑changing financial system.

Confident, because we are prepared to act decisively, publicly, and proactively to address misconduct and emerging risks.

And ambitious, because we are willing to raise the bar – for ourselves, and for the financial system that Australians rely on – by testing the law and driving systemic change through every available channel.

You can see evidence of this ambition in our work on financial hardship, which has led to improvements in how home lenders are supporting their customers,^[9] and in the significant penalty we are seeking against Westpac for their hardship failures.

You can see it in our Better Banking surveillance reports, which resulted in banks committing to refund more than $160 million to low-income consumers.

And you can see it in our efforts to pursue Cigno Australia and BSF Solutions all the way to the High Court for alleged predatory lending practices^[10].

Ambition is why I set up the ASIC Simplification Consultative Group to start to address regulatory complexity, and to streamline interactions with ASIC for businesses and consumers.^[11] And it is why we have launched our largest consumer campaign in a decade to better support Australians in retirement through Moneysmart^[12]. I’m very proud of Moneysmart, and you can continue to see it grow.

It is no secret that the ASIC that I inherited had its challenges. Following the Financial Services Royal Commission, among other things, confidence had rightly been shaken in ASIC as a regulator. We faced criticism that we were a watchdog with no teeth.

But today, ASIC is one of the most active enforcement agencies in the country. What that means is that we are in court somewhere in the country nearly every single day of the week, driving accountability for serious misconduct. That is literally true. Magistrates Courts around the country. Supreme Courts. Federal Courts. The Full Court of the Federal Court. And the High Court. That is a massive investment from ASIC that I’m very proud of. And we are securing considerable penalties as well.

Since my term began, we have more than doubled the number of formal investigations that we undertake per year, and more than quadrupled the value of penalties obtained.^[13]  That means that we are acting on more reports of misconduct and intelligence gathered through our regulatory work. We are using our compulsory information gathering powers to force entities to produce documents, answer questions, and attend examinations under oath. And we are bringing these cases to court.

So far this financial year, we have secured more than $411 million in penalties, not including those still subject to court approval.^[14] Our work has also seen approximately $421 million returned to investors in connection with investigations into the Shield Master Fund and First Guardian Master Fund^[15],^[16], ^[17].

I am proud that we have people on the ground in every state and territory holding financial institutions to account, including those in regional communities. A recent highlight for me was opening our new Darwin office as part of our expanded presence in the Northern Territory. For many years, we only had one person based in the Territory. That was unacceptable when you consider the harm we have seen in recent years impacting First Nations consumers. Now we have a team in Darwin with broad expertise and deep local knowledge, and we are in a better position to address the challenges that remote communities face engaging with the financial system, and to regulate entities operating in those communities, which I am sure will be welcome news to many of you.

And I am proud to say that we are not conservative in the cases that we take on. Our recent enforcement action against Money3 for alleged breaches of responsible lending laws is an excellent example.^[18] We live and work in a complex regulatory system. We knew from the outset that this would be a challenging case. Responsible lending cases always are. But regardless, we felt that this was an important case to take on, given the serious concerns of consumer advocates and the severe impacts on the individuals involved. Many of these people were single parents surviving on Centrelink payments, left unable to purchase groceries or pay bills after entering into Money3 loans. Many were forced to seek assistance from charities or financial counsellors to get by.^[19] Indeed, I would like to recognise the financial counsellors for all the work you are doing. You are a critical part of ASIC’s work. You worked alongside us to help us contact clients impacted by the conduct we were investigating, and ultimately secure the evidence required to run our case in court.  We cannot run cases like this without your assistance, so your efforts were invaluable.

Although the outcome of the case could be described as somewhat of a mixed bag, and in some respects disappointing, our appetite to act in this space is not diminished. It is not changed. So long as we have a reasonable basis to do so, we will continue to take on the hard cases where success is not guaranteed – and that includes continuing to test responsible lending laws.  

Making choices

So, the ASIC of today is very different to the ASIC of the past. None of the changes I have described have occurred by accident, of course, but through deliberate and, at times, difficult decisions, and the hard work of many people – too many to name here. However, I would like to acknowledge Commissioner Alan Kirkland, who is sitting right in front of me, known to many of you I’m sure, as well as my Deputy Chair, Sarah Court, who will become the next Chair of ASIC from June. I should mention as well, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are seven or eight other ASIC colleagues in the room, so if you get the chance to meet them, please do so.

One of the significant decisions that Sarah and I made early on was to introduce a practice of ASIC announcing annually its enforcement priorities. For four years, we have announced these priorities at our Annual Forum. I’m told Sarah’s speech has become highly anticipated in the market for this reason^[20].

Why is this so significant? Well:

1. It provides clarity on where ASIC expends its resources and how we prioritise cases, which is important for a publicly funded agency.
2. It has a deterrent effect in its own right, and prevention is always better than a cure – something I might come back to later.
3. And perhaps most significantly – it requires ASIC to be accountable for doing what we said we would do.

In certain quarters, it has been suggested that ASIC should be quieter about its work or do deals behind closed doors. However, I never want the public to lose confidence in ASIC again in the same way it did in more recent times after the royal commission. And maintaining confidence means telling people what you’re going to do and following through on it.

Being a regulator is ultimately about making choices. Every day, we have to make difficult choices about what we litigate, what we investigate. But the thing about choice is that every time you say ‘yes’ to something, you are effectively saying ‘no’ to something else. ASIC does not have unlimited resources, and the reality is that there are a limited number of cases we can bring each year. That is why being transparent about the choices we make, and why we make them, is so important.

Working together

What many of you working on the frontline may not realise though, is that the information that you provide directly to us and to consumer advocacy groups informs those choices.

Many of the organisations represented here are longstanding members of ASIC’s Consumer Consultative Panel^[21]. Indeed, I want to acknowledge Financial Counselling Australia chief executive Domenique Meyrick, who is a representative on this panel, as well as Fiona Guthrie, who was a long-time member and has been a steadfast supporter of, and collaborator with, ASIC for many years. 

What this means in practice is that the information you provide may end up being discussed around our commission table – sometimes the next day or the next week. These valuable insights inform how we prioritise our resources.

This leads me to one of the key points that I wanted to make today. ASIC is an incredibly active regulator, but we simply cannot be everywhere at once. And in these volatile times, it is more important than ever that we work together to address consumer harm. Consumer advocates and ASIC have a long history of collaborative action. Our hardship work was informed by intelligence from financial counsellors – at the very outset of our surveillance, you told us that people were falling through the cracks and we listened. You helped us to gather the evidence we needed to pursue stop orders against Coral Coast Distributors to prevent it from signing up customers to harmful credit products through Centrepay in its Urban Rampage stores.^[22] And it was your voices that helped influence our decision to appeal our case against Youpla, which sent a strong deterrence message to anyone seeking to mislead Aboriginal consumers^[23].

More to do

In areas like hardship, we know there is more work to do by lenders. As I alluded to at the beginning, these are difficult times for many people in Australia, which makes it all the more pressing that lenders support customers experiencing financial hardship. Ensuring that customers know hardship assistance may be available, and when and how to request that assistance is of critical importance. We are not taking a backwards step on this issue and we are continuing to keep an eye on how lenders are supporting their customers.

And if hardship supports break down, debt management and credit repair services should not leave people in even greater financial difficulty. Which is why in July we will reveal what’s going wrong in this sector and what must change. Later this year we will report on the harm we are seeing in debt collection and motor vehicle financing too. And let me be clear, if a model thrives on pressure, opacity, or harm, ASIC will step in.

The difficulties that many in our small business sector face right now are also top of my mind, and the Commission’s mind. We take referrals from the FCA’s Small Business Debt Helpline very seriously. Where we see harm, we will take enforcement action. Where we see opportunities for improvement, we will engage with education and guidance. We will be releasing a refreshed small business strategy later this year to support these objectives.

We are also alive to the risks that new technologies present. Already we are removing record numbers of social media phishing and investment scam websites – almost 12,000 in the past year alone^[24]. Artificial intelligence has turbocharged these online threats, and with the advent of agentic AI (which I personally find extraordinary – no one was talking about agentic AI 12 months ago) these numbers will only go in one direction – up. ASIC is committed to building the financial literacy of Australians through Moneysmart. I know many of you use the tools and resources on Moneysmart with your clients and I thank you for that. We need to continue to provide trusted sources of guidance because people risk being exploited by these new technologies. The goal of lifting the financial capability within the community is one we share. The Minister [Tania Plibersek] mentioned the importance of agency – that's got to be the fundamental strategy.

There are of course always business models emerging that test the regulatory perimeter. Most recently, we have witnessed unscrupulous actors trying to exploit the significant pot of money in our superannuation system through what we suspect is industrial-scale misconduct. Everyday Australians who signed up for a free super check have instead lost their life savings.

We must disrupt the lead generation model that has enabled this conveyer belt of consumer harm to occur. One way to do it, from my personal view, and something the Government I know is consulting on, would be to ban unlicenced communications about superannuation. After all, super is one of the biggest assets many of us accumulate in our lifetimes – the people talking about it should be appropriately qualified.

We wouldn’t let someone perform heart surgery just because they’ve watched a lot of E.R. – therefore we shouldn’t let people who aren’t qualified lure Australians into losing their life savings and turn a profit from it.

In my view the most effective way to address this misconduct is to stop it at the source – and a ban on unlicenced communications would certainly go a long way to achieving that.

So, there are always new risks emerging. And meeting all these challenges means ASIC cannot stand still. It requires us to continually invest into technology, into data, and into capability. Moreover, it requires us to be bold and explore the full protective reach of our laws. It requires us to be proactive in identifying new and emerging risks. And it requires us to continually reshape ourselves in response to the problems of the day.

Those challenges mean that the job of transformation will never be done at ASIC. But I know I leave the task in excellent hands. 

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to return for a moment to where I started today – with the prosecutor they called the ‘hellhound’.

If there is one lesson to be drawn from Ferdinand Pecora’s story, it is that accountability works best when it is seen and when it is felt. It is not enough to enforce the rules quietly – confidence depends on people seeing them enforced. That means regulators cannot work from behind closed doors – and watchdogs need to both bark and bite to be effective.

I hope my remarks today have assured you that ASIC is that kind of regulator, and that when you come to us with serious concerns, we’re going to listen and we’re going to get onto it.

Thank you to Domenique [Meyrick] and the FCA for inviting me to speak. I should say on a personal note that this is my last speech as ASIC Chair. Thank you.

[1] Ali Salehian, ‘The Slow Death of International Law: A Return to the 1930s’ (Online, Modern Diplomacy, 15 March 2026)

[2] Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History (Viking, 2025), pg. 14.

[3] Michael Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Books, 2011)

[4] The Australian Securities Commission became the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and took on additional responsibilities in 1998, following the Wallis inquiry. Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Annual Report 1998–99 (1999)

[5] Rob McQueen, ‘An Examination of Australian Corporate Law and Regulation 1901–1961’ (1992) 15(1) UNSW Law Journal 1, pg. 11.

[6] Roman Tomasic, Stephen Bottomley and Rob McQueen, Corporations Law in Australia (Federation Press, 4th ed, 2012), pg. 24.

[7] The Australian Financial Review reported in 1992 that the ASC’s 1991 budget was $135 million, about 19 times the annual budget of the National Companies and Securities Commission. This would make its annual budget comparable to the budget of Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 film, Reservoir Dogs.

[8] Rob McQueen, ‘Why High Court Judges Make Poor Historians: The Corporations Act Case and Early Attempts to Establish a National System of Company Regulation in Australia’ (1990) 18 Federal Law Review 240.

[9] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Report 815: Hardship, not as hard to get help – But lenders still need to do more (Report, 25 September 2025)

[10] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘Cigno Australia and director Mark Swanepoel, BSF Solutions and director Brenton Harrison to pay $7 million in penalties for Credit Act breaches’ (Media Release, 26‑078MR, 17 April 2026)

[11] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC slashes red tape and calls for further regulatory simplification proposals’ (Media Release, 25‑190MR, 3 September 2025)

[12] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘From anxiety to action: helping Australians to plan for their financial future’ (Media Release, 26‑074MR, 13 April 2026)

[13] Formal investigations have more doubled from 110 in 2020-21 to 252 in 2024-25. The total dollar value of penalties has increased from $24.9 million in 2019-20 to $104.1million in 2024-25.

[14] As of 20 April 2026.

[15] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC secures record $350 million in civil penalties and $583 million back to Australians in second half of 2025’ (Media Release, 26‑032MR, 25 February 2026)

[16] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘Federal Court declares Macquarie contravened the Corporations Act in relation to Shield Master Fund’ (Media Release, 26‑053MR, 20 March 2026)

[17] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘Netwealth admits to First Guardian failures and agrees to compensate affected members $100 million’ (Media Release, 25‑307MR, 18 December 2025)

[18] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘Court delivers ruling in Money3 responsible lending case’ (Media Release, 25‑198MR, 9 September 2025)

[19] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC v Money3 Loans Pty Ltd – Concise Statement’ (Media Release, 23‑126MR, 17 May 2023)

[20] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC Announces Enforcement Priorities for 2023’ (Media Release, 22‑302MR, 3 November 2022)

[21] For example, Financial Counselling Australia, the Financial Rights Legal Centre, the Consumer Action Law Centre, Mob Strong, ICAN, and the Consumer Credit Legal Service.

[22] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC orders end to Centrepay credit arrangements in Urban Rampage stores’ (Media Release, 24‑084MR, 26 April 2024)

[23] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC successfully appeals ACBF and Youpla misrepresentations case’ (Media Release, 24‑033MR, 14 February 2024)

[24] Australian Securities and Investments Commission, ‘ASIC ramps up action to protect consumers from AI‑powered online investment scams’ (Media Release, 26‑063MR, 8 April 2026)