ASIC’s Kirkland urges advisers to hold peers to account

Mike Taylor

Managing Editor and Publisher

16 October 2025

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) is urging financial advisers to dob-in their peers if they believe they are doing the wrong thing.

ASIC Commissioner, Alan Kirkland said advisers are in a unique position to recognise when someone had been the victim of poor advice.

Addressing an Institute of Managed Accounts Professionals (IMAP) event in Sydney, Kirkland said that individually, and with their peers, advisers had to uphold the ethical standards of the profession and hold each other accountable in the public interest.

“Where you detect concerning conduct, we encourage you to report it to ASIC,” he said.

Kirkland then referenced the fall-out from the Shield and First Guardian failures “where best interests duties and conflict of interest obligations appeared to have been blatantly disregarded”.

He said that while Shield and First Guardian were dominating the headlines, they were not the only instances “where industry professionals appear to be playing fast and loose with people’s life savings”.

“We’ve currently got active multiple investigations into high risk super switching schemes each involving multiple third parties and associates,” Kirkland said.

Like other senior ASIC officials he said that the regulator was scrutinising every part of the value chain.

Dealing with ASIC’s upcoming review of the managed accounts environment, Kirkland the same rules around providing services efficiently, honestly and fairly still applied but urged against a cookie cutter approach.

Questioned by IMAP chair, Toby Potter, Kirkland said ASIC was going into the exercise with an open mind in circumstances where the regulator had not looked specifically at managed accounts for some time.

“We’ll be looking at what is the state of play, what are some of the different propositions in the market and how they differ,” he said.

Kirkland said ASIC wanted to understand the efficiencies of managed accounts as opposed to advising on individual managed portfolios, how the efficiencies are being realised and who is capturing the value from the efficiencies.