FSC’s top priority is holding Jones accountable for deregulation promise, says CEO

According to Blake Briggs, chief executive officer of the Financial Services Council, the FSC’s number one focus at the moment is ensuring Minister of Financial Services Stephen Jones delivers on his commitment to deregulate the financial advice sector.

Speaking to ifa’s sister brand InvestorDaily, Mr Briggs said: “Financial advice is topic of the day and will probably be topic of the day for some time to come”.

“Making sure the Assistant Treasurer, Stephen Jones, delivers on his commitment to deregulate the financial advice sector and make life a lot easier for financial advisors is probably issue number one at the moment. So big focus for the FSC, definitely.”

Reflecting on the developments of 2023, including progress made on the Quality of Advice Review and the proposed reforms within the superannuation sector, Mr Briggs said “there is reason for optimism” going into the new year.

“We do expect progress on financial advice deregulation and that is so important to the financial advice community. Every part of the advice value chain is just weighed down by the cost of regulation and the commitment by the minister to make progress on that is critical,” Mr Briggs said.

“We do expect to see legislation implementing that this year, with the hope that it would be in Parliament and through Parliament early in 2024. So, I think that will just be a really important start to the year and an important win.”

Mr Briggs also shared that the FSC and the Financial Services Council New Zealand will be hosting the Trans-Tasman Strategic Leaders Summit in March to work on common regulatory questions. Among other commonalities, he noted that there are a lot of parallels between the countries’ advice industries.

“There are a lot of common regulatory issues but we’re also in a similar situation. A lot of the global economic headwinds that we’re facing, or global regulatory trends hit Australia and New Zealand around the same time and organisations in both jurisdictions need to grapple with those,” Mr Briggs said.

“They’re going through a similar debate around the professionalisation of the advice industry and the standards expected of advisers.”

Mr Briggs also shared that he believes 2024 will likely be an election year.

“They could drag it into 2025, but it’s more likely to be the backend of next year and if that is the case, then, I might prove to be wrong, but governments tend to slow down the reform agenda in the lead-up to an election because they don’t want to concern people and they want to focus on their election campaigns,” Mr Briggs said.

But, he noted, while regulatory changes and compliance expectations are unlikely to decrease, there may be a slight reduction in legislative activity.

“We are lucky because we have regulators. When you look at the volume of superannuation reform that is being pushed out particularly through APRA at the moment, there is an enormous amount of work around data reporting, and coming from ASIC around the climate and the like, so I don’t think we’ll see a slackening off or a slowing down in regulatory change and compliance expectations but, with a bit of luck, there might be a bit of slowing in the legislative pipeline.”

According to parliamentary documents, the earliest an election could take place is 3 August 2024, with that window set to close mid-May 2025.