Regulators praised FINSIA for giving them the opportunity to highlight their increasingly collaborative work when they appeared at our signature event.
ASIC Chair Joe Longo thanked FINSIA as he spoke to an audience of more than 300 about the upcoming priorities for the corporate regulator.
“Professional bodies and events like these play an important role in shaping professional standards across the financial services industry,” he said in a keynote to the audience.
“In turn, improved standards help to maintain trust in the financial system.”
Mr Longo, who was appearing virtually, urged the audience in Sydney to drive a culture of compliance and innovation to improve outcomes for consumers and investors.
APRA Chair John Lonsdale echoed his thanks to FINSIA for helping the prudential regulator highlight its work at the event where he talked about the benefits and challenges with the increasing interconnectedness of the financial system.
Mr Lonsdale also used the speech, which can be accessed in full here, as an opportunity to call for entities to improve their defences against cyber-attacks, pointing out that many are “struggling with foundational issues”.
In his speech, Reserve Bank Assistant Governor Dr Brad Jones spoke about the Bank’s work internationally and the new challenges that have been emerging.
“These challenges have a different complexion to those of recent decades and include rapid-fire bank deposit runs, contagion risk, higher interest rate volatility, geopolitics, operational risk and climate change,” he said.
“This is a rather daunting list of challenges for both regulators and industry, which means that in the years ahead, we will need to constantly challenge ourselves on what resilience needs to look like.”
He also highlighted the need for joint regulatory agency operations during the panel discussion that followed.
“The commonality of issues that we confront is really striking. We’re all dealing with, effectively, the same issues. They just play out slightly different in our patches,” he said.
AUSTRAC CEO Peter Soros, whose organisation was returning after first appearing at The Regulators in 2022, agreed with the need to work together during the Q&A.
“We’ve done really collaborative enforcement work with ASIC in the casino sector, we’ve done some great joint enforcement work with APRA in the banking sector, and you’ll see more of that,” he said.
“None of us have the resources on our own that we’d all love, we’d always love more, but the more that we can collaborate and share, the better it is.”
John Lonsdale added: “We can’t do our job without collaborating. That’s the frank answer.
“The financial system is global. It’s all interconnected. We can’t just be in our own bubble and do our own work; we’ve got to be cognisant of what others are doing and collaborate together.”
