A speech by Greg Medcraft, Chairman, Australian Securities and Investments Commission at the Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) Lunch (Melbourne, Australia) 29 July 2016
Introduction
Thank you, Michael, and good afternoon everyone.
Thank you for inviting me to speak at this CEDA lunch today.
I’ve been asked to speak on the future priorities of ASIC and the financial system.
There are five points I would like to make upfront to set the scene for talking about this.
- ASIC’s fundamental objective is to allow markets to fund the real economy and, in turn, economic growth. In doing so, we contribute to the wellbeing of all Australians.
- We seek to achieve that objective through our twin strategic priorities of promoting investor and financial consumer trust and confidence and ensuring fair, orderly, transparent and efficient markets.
- How we achieve these twin strategic priorities in the future will be influenced by the key challenges we face. These challenges are:
- conduct risk and the balance between a free market-based system with investor and financial consumer protection
- digital disruption and cyber resilience in our financial services and markets
- structural change in our financial system through market-based financing, which is driven by the growth in superannuation
- complexity in financial markets and products driven by innovation, and
- globalisation of financial markets, products and services.
- We have set out our future strategy for dealing with these challenges in our four-year Corporate Plan, ASIC’s Corporate Plan 2015–2016 to 2018–2019, which we published in August last year. And this August we will publish our Corporate Plan for a further four years.
- As you know ASIC’s activities are focused on both financial services and markets. But today my comments are primarily focused on markets. Financial markets play a central role in the growth and prosperity of our economy by facilitating the raising of debt and equity capital by issuers, and the efficient allocation of resources and risks by investors.
So today I would like to talk in detail about:
- the importance of trust and confidence in markets, and
- how ASIC is focusing on building that trust and confidence across three particular areas:
- equity markets
- debt markets, and
- derivatives markets.