ASIC report says platforms foundational to digital

Mike Taylor

Managing Editor and Publisher

22 May 2026

A new report issued by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has pointed to large integrated investment platforms as providing a strong foundation for digital innovation.

The ASIC report points to the platforms “operated by major wealth managers and superannuation funds” and the manner in which “many advisers rely on digital platforms for client reporting, portfolio rebalancing and investment analysis”.

It suggests that the provision of personalised digital advice is expected to become more widespread.

At the same time, the report said that opportunities for development existed in the reality that cross-institutional data remains limited – something which is constraining the development of fully personalised financial planning tools”.

In doing so, it pointed to Singapore and Canada having open finance initiatives which already allow aggregation of financial data across institutions, enabling more holistic advice.

The report notes that Australia’s Consumer Data Right does not yet cover investment or superannuation data.

The report includes a five-year outlook consisting of:

• Automation in portfolio management is expected to continue expanding. A key issue for ASIC is whether accountability and suitability obligations remain workable as systems become more adaptive.
• Personalised digital advice is also expected to become more widespread where open-finance frameworks broaden the data available to platforms, making data access strategically important because it shapes the quality of advice rather than because it is an innovation in itself.
• AI-supported investment analysis will likely become more common. A key regulatory question is how these tools interact with disclosure, suitability and investor understanding once they are embedded in execution environments.

The report suggested that the Government and ASIC will need to consider some key issues including:

• Automated portfolio management raises questions about accountability when investment decisions are made by algorithms rather than human advisers. Those questions become harder again where systems begin to prompt or sequence actions in more adaptive ways. *
• Platform design features, including copy trading, social trading, gamification and fractionalised access models, could influence investor behaviour, potentially encouraging excessive trading or risk-taking even when they fall short of formal personal advice.
• Some broader fragility questions are discussed in the second report in this two-part series, but here we note that it is worth considering how low-friction digital interfaces can change investor behaviour, in addition to any wider market-structure effect