ASIC has approved more than 320 applications for Australian financial services licences (AFSL) in the past 12 months, a chart from the corporate regulator has shown.
The regulator released the details in response to questions from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services over how ASIC is working towards early detection of people who might either inadvertently or deliberately mislead ASIC in the information they provide.
Between 2010 and 2011, the regulator examined 529 applications for AFSL approval.
Of that number, 328 licence requests were approved, 159 rejected or withdrawn at pre-lodgement, 39 withdrawn, one withdrawn after an ASIC hearing and two refused after a hearing, the chart said.
ASIC also received more than 1600 application variations of AFSLs.
Of the 1651 lodged, the corporate regulator licensed 1410; rejected or withdrew 119 at pre-lodgement; 106 were withdrawn, while 16 applications were refused.
ASIC said the reason behind the significant difference in applications lodged and those finalised was that ASIC had a “significant number of applications on hand as at 30 June 2010”.
“ASIC had received significant volumes of licence and variation applications prior to 30 June 2010 from those industry participants requesting margin lending authorisations due to the implementation of the Corporations Legislation Amendment (Financial Services Modernisation) Act 2009,” ASIC said in a statement to the PJC.
“The on-hand applications (a smaller volume) as at 30 June 2011 also contribute to the difference between the lodged and finalised figures.”
In August, the first tranche of the federal government’s Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) draft legislation moved to extend ASIC.
The first tranche indicated ASIC would not only be able to refuse a licence or ban a person where it was certain the person would not comply with the obligations or would break the law, but also where it suspected they might do so.
In the past, ASIC found it was nearly impossible to prove it was certain an applicant was not going to comply with the obligations as a licensee.
