Ensuring effective management and board oversight of non-financial risk is ASIC’s key focus
Key takeouts
- ASIC Chair Joe Longo has said that effective management and board oversight of non-financial risks, and ‘governance failures’ in this context that result in ‘significant harm to consumers and investors’ are key areas of focus for the regulator. This includes for example: failure by boards to identify and manage non-financial risks ‘attaching to a company’s business activities’, failing to ‘respond to indicators that risks are not being properly managed’ and ‘failure to ensure that appropriate resources are allocated to deal with risks’.
- Key non-financial risk areas on which ASIC will focus over the next 12 months include (among others): cyber security/cyber resilience, greenwashing and effective governance of climate related/sustainability risks, and whistleblowing
- DDO implementation: With respect to oversight of/enforcement of design and distribution obligations (DDOs) Mr Longo said that ASIC now considers that ‘industry is reaching a point where it has had sufficient time to bed down its implementation of the regime. We will therefore be expecting compliance with the…
