The news: The corporate regulator has revealed its enforcement priorities for 2025, with 12 key areas including a focus on the pensions and insurance industries, greenwashing and failures by financial licensees to have adequate cyber security protections in place.

The context: The announcement, made by Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) vice-chair Sarah Court, comes just days after the regulator took legal action against Cbus retirement fund and expressed concern about systemic customer failures in the industry.

The regulator is expected to unveil guidance on cryptocurrencies before the end of the year, but has included enforcement of the crypto industry in its “business as usual” priorities for 2025, after a series of cases over the past year that have tested how existing measures are applied to crypto products.

Ahead of legal action over the next 12 months, the Court said ASIC and other regulators, including the competition regulator, remained concerned about the $4,500 a day cap on what they can pay lawyers, compared with fees of up to at $25,000 per day.

The fee caps have not been reviewed for more than a decade, and while the Court noted that ASIC had worked with “exceptional” lawyers, the watchdog wanted the flexibility to bring a wider range of lawyers on its cases and to level the playing field with “broad legal legislation”. resources” at the top of the city.

What they said: During a discussion at ASIC’s annual forum today, the Court was asked whether action against super ultimately harms customer accounts and whether trustees should be held to the same account as directors of public companies.

The court said: “The administrators, (in our view), are no different from any other important city company. So, you know, we don’t hear a lot of people worrying about bank shareholders when we’re suing banks and insurance companies and stuff.

The (second) point is that it is up to pension administrators how they provide reserves and the extent of those reserves for compliance costs. And obviously they are a highly regulated sector by both ASIC and APRA (Australian Prudential Regulation Authority).

“I think the third point is, you know, we’re taking these actions because we’re trying to send a strong, dissuasive message to the wider sector that it’s just unacceptable that these big administrators are failing to deliver to their members.

“… On the second question about trustee directors, again, ASIC’s view is that directors who sit around superannuation boards are in no different position to directors of any other company and certainly ASIC will have always an interest in that area.”