The Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA) has received more than 2000 complaints in regards to the Shield and First Guardian master funds and expects this figure to grow given the number of impacted investors is six times higher, a senior executive has stated.
AFCA lead ombudsman for investments and advice Shail Singh said the dispute resolution body had received 2130 complaints so far, but figures released by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) indicated there were 11,800 investors affected by the failure of the investment schemes.
“For the Shield Master Fund, AFCA has now received 864 complaints and based on ASIC’s information around 5800 investors were exposed to the fund, so we expect that number to grow,” Singh said during a presentation hosted by PritchittBland Communications last week.
“The First Guardian Master Fund shows a very similar pattern at an even larger scale and AFCA has received 1266 complaints about First Guardian and ASIC has indicated that approximately 6000 investors were affected.”
He added AFCA received around 110,000 complaints in 2025, of which 60,000 related to banking and financial services, with the investment and advice subsector registering 5800 complaints, a 56 per cent increase on the previous year, driven primarily by the collapse of Shield and First Guardian.
The collapse of the two funds was “one of the most significant financial failures we’ve seen in recent years”, leading to investors collectively losing around $1.2 billion in retirement savings, he said.
“It’s worth noting that some people were exposed to both Shield and First Guardian, so a number of complaints appear in both sets of figures, which gives you a sense of how intertwined these numbers were,” he added.
“What all of this tells us is that we’re not dealing with a single point of failure. We’re dealing with multiple entities across advice, funds, management, trusteeship and product operation, some solvent, some insolvent, and a very large number of people who followed remarkably similar pathways into them.”
