The 2026 Financial Counselling Australia Conference was held in Cairns on May 7. This fireside discussion followed Joe Longo’s last keynote speech as ASIC Chair.
Dan Ziffer: Well, thank you Joe. And what an honour this is for this to be the exit interview.
Joe Longo: Well, that’s already happened.
[Laughter]
Joe Longo: We can’t call this an exit interview.
Dan Ziffer: You have changed the stance and the attitude of ASIC. I mean, your successor’s name is literally Court.
[Laughter]
What’s your ambition for the coming years for the regulator?
Joe Longo: Well, it’s to continue what we started. So, when Sarah and I started, we were on the back foot. We need to be frank about that. And my vision for ASIC, and I think people who have worked with me closely must be sick of hearing it, but a day does not pass when I don’t remind everybody why we’re here. We want to be a modern, confident, ambitious regulator. They’re the three key things I constantly talk about with staff, with the senior leadership team, and indeed with everyone who works with ASIC. Because that’s what it’s going to take, continue taking, to address the issues we are being asked to deal with.
Dan Ziffer: You can’t be everywhere – you touched on this in the speech. How much do you rely on the sector collectively to bring you what you need to take action?
Joe Longo: Oh, it’s hugely important. Even this morning I’ve learned about some new issues I hadn’t heard of before. There’s just so much going on. So, I think the first critical thing is that I feel very strongly that ASIC needs to systematically engage with the community, and this sector in particular, so we know what’s going on. If we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t even get to, as the Americans say, to the bathroom. We’re clueless. So it’s extremely important that we’re listening carefully to everything that the sector’s telling us.
Secondly, and I mentioned this in the speech, that the reality of regulation, or one of the realities of regulation, is you are making choices all the time. But you want to be making those choices from a well-informed, rational position. Now in the end, that we get intelligence and feedback, formal and informal, from a lot of the people in this room and more broadly, and it’s extremely helpful. Our job is to give people confidence that we’re listening, and that we actually understand what we’re being told. And secondly, be transparent about why we place more priority on one issue over another.
And again, the dialogue and engagement with people in this room will help us get that right, hopefully. But in the end, it’s on us to make decisions about whether we take a matter on or not. But I hope that if we follow that approach, that it will give people confidence to say, oh, we really wanted ASIC to handle 10 problems, they’re only able to handle five, but we understand why. And I think that builds confidence. And it’s in the public interest that an entity, that a regulator with limited resources is using them to best effect.
Dan Ziffer: You talked about prevention and cure, essentially the fence at the top of the cliff or the ambulance at the bottom. With ASIC and more broadly, when you look at financial harms and scams and people trying to do ill, do you think we have the mix right on those two forces?
Joe Longo: Look, I think we have to invest a lot more in prevention, frankly. I mean, I’ve talked in other places about financial literacy, and I think that the Minister’s use of the word agency is another great concept. My words are a bit more legalistic, is that I want everyone to be equipped and empowered to be able to act in their own interests. That’s the key. People need to have enough confidence and knowledge of what’s going on in the world and the system, that as each new opportunity arises to invest in something or to spend on something, that they’re in a good position to make a decision in their own interests, which is another way of defining agency.
Prevention’s got to be better than a cure. It has to be. So the investment in Moneysmart, in our schools, in our families, in the way in which we talk about these issues, the way in which we talk about risk and return, the more we do that, the more likely that the losses, and I’ve said this publicly as well, we’ll always had losses, but obviously we want to minimise those losses, but prevention’s much better than a cure.
Secondly, define cure. Of course we’re going to litigate and do the best we can to hold individuals and companies accountable for serious misconduct, but we’re not going to catch everybody. And secondly, for those people who suffer losses, we’re not equipped or resourced, it’s not part of our mandate, to recover all those losses.
So, the important thing is that we have an open dialogue and conversation with the Australian community to say, look, you’ve got superannuation, you’ve got insurance, we’ve got a fairly sophisticated system around financial services in Australia. We have to help people understand that system, and empower them to navigate it. The more we do that, I think we will see losses being at some minimal level rather than some awful level.
Dan Ziffer: The power of technology and particularly artificial intelligence in the role of scams, you took down 12,000 scam websites last year, I can’t tell whether that’s an amazing or terrible number, because it’s such a big field, and what technology does is make it flatter, make it easier to get into this business. You obviously can’t do it yourself. Is there enough cooperation from the tech companies to deal with these problems as they arise?
Joe Longo: These are very significant challenges for the regulators in the community. We have an extraordinary concentration of power in a small number of companies or digital platforms. We have to keep engaging with them to ensure that the harms that are obviously occurring stop, or are minimised.
I take a broader position, going back to some earlier remarks. If I was to point to one theme that I think all of us, particularly our children, are grappling with, is technology. The AI phenomenon is absolutely extraordinary. It’s something I’ve been studying for some time now. There are two recent examples. I mentioned the agentic AI in the speech. One of our biggest retailers is now predicting somewhere around 15% of its revenues are going to be driven by bots. Hopefully there are some humans in the background. But that’s extraordinary. We weren’t having that conversation even 12 months ago.
We now have this emerging issue around Claude Mythos, which is a technology Anthropic invented, and is very good at finding vulnerabilities in an entity’s cyber defences. If we don’t get a grip on that, then the consequences are serious and immediate. I think all things technology and data is a conversation that we all need to be having. And what I worry about from a specifically ASIC perspective, is that we need to be on that. We need to understand those technologies and use them for our own purposes to be more efficient and productive, and to be able to have the capability to investigate when things go wrong in that area externally. Secondly, we need to understand what’s going on externally. That is a non-trivial challenge because of the rapidity of change.
Dan Ziffer: On a different topic, it’s still early, but are there lessons already from Shield and First Guardian?
Joe Longo: Well, I think there are. Those lessons are, I think, best understood and learnt through the various law reform proposals that are being consulted on at the moment. We have a situation now, but superannuation – let’s really step back – superannuation has been an enormous success, I think, in Australia. Virtually every adult Australian has a superannuation account. It’s a, frankly, widely admired system globally. It has now grown to around $4.5 trillion.
So, when there’s a lot of money, bad actors like to play. And so that’s the issue we’re all dealing with. The Shield and First Guardian saga really revealed, my words, some vulnerabilities and issues with the way the system is working at the moment. I think the law reform proposals are, I think – Treasury and the government, ASIC’s response to that – so you see some lessons learnt in the way in which we’re trying to amend the law.
But there are some other lessons. Again, this is something I know this group feels passionately about. People need to understand what their super is there for, and where it should be safely put. And if they’re worried about whether they’re getting a sufficient return, ordinary people have got to be given some safe way of answering that question, and having access to financial advice and counselling that reassures them to say, look, leave your money in that fund. If you’re going to charge funds, be really careful.
I think this risk return goes back to financial literacy. If there’s one theme I’m constantly pressing people about it’s to understand risk. Even highly intelligent people get risk assessment wrong. So, the way I like to explain it to my kids and grandchildren, once they’re old enough to understand, is that if someone’s offering you more than 3 or 4% of a fixed-term deposit with a major bank, that’s called a risky investment. And so, this whole risk concept, so I think that’s a big lesson learned. I think a lot of people were lured into, with good intent, wanting to get a better return on their super, and it all went pear-shaped.
Dan Ziffer: As you retire from the role, you’ve massively changed the regulator. As you look back, is there anything that you think, oh, I should have gone harder on that?
Joe Longo: Harder on everything. That got me in trouble a couple of times. I’m not known for patience as being one of my top three virtues. I think we did as much as we could. I did as much as I could in the five years. We inherited some significant governance issues that took time to resolve, and it just takes time. So I think the restructuring mostly worked well, in the first 12 or 18 months I instituted an infrastructure review. So a lot has changed. But I don’t regret it. You do your best with what you know at the time. I think I’ve had the privilege of working with some extraordinary colleagues, some of whom are here today. And so that’s as good as it gets.
[Lengthy applause]
Dan Ziffer: We’ve all signed the card. There’s a cake in the tearoom. But for now, the applause. Please join me in thanking again Joe Longo.
