Australia's corporate watchdog wants to keep two pieces of AFS license relief on the books for another five years, with feedback from the industry due by the start of June.
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The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) said today (Tuesday) it is consulting on remaking two legislative instruments due to expire on October 1, 2026. Both touch the AFS licensing regime that underpins Australia's CFD industry, and both have been in place since 2016.
The Two Instruments at Glance
The first gives general-advice providers a break from AFS licensing rules when their advice appears in specific documents, mainly explanatory statements for foreign schemes of arrangement and offer documents tied to overseas control transactions.
The second exempts issuers and advisers from having to spell out certain figures in Australian dollars on standard disclosure paperwork.
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ASIC said the proposed changes are minor and technical, focused on cleaning up the wording rather than reshaping the substance. The carve-outs would roll forward through 2031.
Discretionary Mutual Funds Get Pulled In
The one bit of new ground is around discretionary mutual funds, the not-for-profit risk-sharing structures used by community groups, churches and some industry associations. ASIC wants the dollar disclosure exemption to cover risk products issued through these funds, which currently sit outside the relief.
It's a narrow expansion, and the agency frames it as a consistency fix rather than a policy shift. Nothing in the proposal changes who can give general advice without an AFS license or which overseas documents qualify.
ASIC has taken a tougher line on adjacent reliefs, reassessing investment introduction service relief last year after low industry use.
A Crowded Regulatory Inbox for AFS Holders
The proposal is administrative, but it lands in the middle of one of the heaviest regulatory years AFS license holders have faced. Brokers, fund managers and advisers under the regime are juggling deadlines that have nothing to do with consultation paper CS 51.
The most pressing is ASIC's no-action position for unlicensed digital asset providers, which expires on June 30, 2026. Crypto firms that miss the cutoff face civil and criminal penalties of up to 10% of annual turnover, and they will be slotting into the same AFS framework being tinkered with in the current consultation.
ASIC reminded those firms only days ago that they have under two months left.
Running alongside that, adviser qualification standards introduced on January 1 are still rippling through the industry, with ASIC running compliance checks against the Financial Advisers Register.
The regulator has also flagged financial reporting misconduct as a top 2026 enforcement priority and earlier proposed easing breach reporting for minor errors fixed inside 30 days.
The licensing pipeline itself has tightened. ASIC granted 290 new AFS licenses in fiscal 2025 while canceling or suspending another 215, and an enforcement campaign produced a record A$583 million in penalties in the second half of 2025.
Submissions Close June 1
Feedback on the proposal can be lodged with ASIC's consultation team until 5pm AEST on June 1.
The document is consultation paper CS 51, "Proposed remake of relief from dollar disclosure reporting and AFS licensing requirements for general advice in certain exempt documents."
If the regulator goes ahead, the new instruments would replace the existing ones before the October 1 sunset and run for another five years, taking the regime through to 2031.
