Financial advisers will be subject to a number of new levels of oversight and corrective action, with the federal government confirming its plans to go ahead with a recommendation from the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry for a new adviser disciplinary body.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg announced the development of the single, central body in an update of work undertaken by the government in response to the 76 recommendations made by the commission in its final report earlier this year.
In the written document released by Treasury, Frydenberg said: “The new body will be responsible for the registration, monitoring and sanctioning of financial advisers.
“This royal commission recommendation builds on the government’s professional standards reforms to raise the educational, training and ethical standards of financial advisers.”
While no exact start date has been scheduled, the update said legislation would be consulted on and introduced into parliament by the end of 2020 to create the new body.
The update did, however, note the time frame for the start of the industry-wide Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority (FASEA) code of ethics, which would begin on 1 January 2020 and will require financial advisers, from 15 November 2019, to subscribe to a code monitoring body that will enforce the code.
The major adviser associations have already agreed to act in concert in submitting applications to become code monitoring bodies and announced today they have made a joint submission to ASIC that proposes a profession-wide solution to the monitoring of the FASEA code.
