Custodians have been encouraged by discussions with ASIC about the potential gatekeeper role the corporate regulator wants them to take on.
After initial concerns about a misinterpretation of the role custodians play in the investment process, executives from the Australian Custodial Services Association (ACSA) are now more confident of ASIC's ideas around whistleblowers.
"We've had some good engagement with ASIC and we were actually quite encouraged by it, by their reinforcement of the different roles that stakeholders have across the value chain," ACSA executive Leigh Watson said.
Custodians were concerned about the level of responsibility the regulator attached to them in an ASIC report released in July.
They said custodians acted on behalf of the responsible entities or trustees, providing asset segregation and other administration services and implementing their directions as requested, a role that limited the scope to act as a whistleblower.
But Watson said the discussions with ASIC made it clear the regulator fully understood the limitations of custodians' responsibilities.
"The key issue here is around where the responsibilities for the investment decisions lie and there is no message coming through that that is going to change in any way," he said.
But it is still unclear whether custodians will be required to expand their reporting duties beyond the existing anti-money laundering standards.
"That is one area where we will need to get into more dialogue with ASIC around," ACSA executive David Braga said.
"We are not sure about the way they are thinking about the whistleblower commentary that they put in their report."
ASIC is also still considering the suggestion to change the term 'custodian' to something that better reflects these organisations' activities.
"[ASIC] have referred to the idea that custodians may be referred to as 'depositories', but I don't think they have made any first and final comments on it," Watson said.
Braga said changing the term would cause confusion from a global perspective.
"A better solution is not a name change per se, but a better disclosure across the industry about what a custodian does and doesn't do," he said.
"It is a global industry, it is global terminology; depository has different connotations in other markets."
The current review of custodians' responsibilities followed the publication in May of a report by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services into the collapse of Trio Capital.
