Key points
- Growing the financial literacy of Australians is central to ASIC’s role in promoting confident and informed participation in the financial system.
- Consumers are often vulnerable to exploitation in the financial system because for many of the decisions they make, they are equipped with less knowledge than the person or firm on the other side of the transaction.
- Through its Moneysmart program ASIC provides financial information and guidance to enable consumers to make decisions that support their financial future.
Good morning.
It’s a pleasure to be with you this morning.
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
I pay my respects to their elders past and present – and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.
I also acknowledge the amazing First Nations counsellors and capability workers across the country. I think in the 20 years I’ve been around these types of conversations, one of the most important shifts I’ve seen has been the growth of a network and movement of First Nations workers working on these issues, and I’ll tell you that they are such an important source of intelligence for us. It has a huge impact on the priorities that we choose.
Thank you to the Ecstra team for the invitation to speak today.
It’s good to be here because enabling the financial wellbeing of Australians is really core to what ASIC does and has been for close to 25 years. There’s a good reason for that.
The very first section the ASIC Act – the legislation that sets us up - makes it clear that that’s something that Parliament wanted us to do.
It says that in going about our work, ASIC must strive to […] promote the confident and informed participation of investors and consumers in the financial system.
So ‘confident’ and ‘informed’.
And that requires not only that we work alongside organisations like those in the room today to build the financial knowledge and capability of all Australians, but it also requires that we make it easy for them to find the information and tools that they require to confidently navigate the financial system at key life stages when they are considering important financial decisions.
And that’s what we try to do through ASIC’s Moneysmart work.
So, today I want to speak briefly about:
- the role of Moneysmart and financial literacy in consumer protection, and
- the work we are doing to refresh and rebuild Moneysmart.
The role of financial literacy in consumer protection
I’ve mentioned that the ASIC Act sets out a clear expectation that we will build the knowledge and confidence of consumers in the financial system.
I want to say that’s not the only reason we do that. It’s also because we see this as core to our work in consumer protection.
Consumers in the financial system – and I don’t need to tell people in the room this but it’s important to say - that consumers in the financial system are often vulnerable to exploitation because in almost every decision they make, they are equipped with less knowledge than the person or firm on the other side of the transaction.
We see this in our work every day.
People on low incomes being hit with excessive fees on their transaction accounts, without knowing they could be in a low-fee account.
Consumers who acquire a product via a consumer lease, without realising that they will end up paying four times the retail cost of the item.
People who take steps to find a better super account but find themselves tricked into moving their super from a relatively safe fund into a high-risk option.
Or people who are advised to set up a self-managed super fund when it is clearly not in their best interests –we have a big report out today that points to the scale of that problem.
These situations have real economic consequences for the people involved – whether that’s not having enough money to pay essential bills or losing their entire retirement savings.
Through our Moneysmart work, we hope to ensure that fewer people find themselves caught in these traps, by bridging at least part of the knowledge gap between consumers and the people who stand to gain from their misfortune.
Now that’s an ambitious goal – particularly when we are dealing with industrial-scale misconduct, as is the case with some of the high-risk super-switching matters that are a huge priority for ASIC at the moment.
But it is our hope that when somebody’s faced with a financial decision, they might recall a relevant Moneysmart social media post or they might, through research online, find their way to a Moneysmart resource that can put them in a better position to make decisions that reflect their best interests.
In talking about the role of financial literacy in our consumer protection work, I want to make it clear that we don’t see it as the only – or even the best – way to protect consumers.
Many other factors sit around the role of financial education – adequate income, access to affordable housing, health outcomes.
And I want to add to that by saying that financial literacy and education need to be complemented by strong consumer protection laws that encourage firms to do the right thing by their customers. Both are important parts of the consumer protection system.
And, with that in mind, we are now using Moneysmart in a broader range of ways to support our strong consumer protection.
So a few examples of that:
We have targeted campaigns and resources alongside key regulatory priorities. Last year, when we launched a major report on the financial hardship responses of a number of lenders in Australia, we launched a ‘Just ask’ campaign which was really about raising awareness of the fact that consumers could ask for financial hardship assistance if they had a credit product and were concerned about being able to make their repayments.
We’ve also launched successive campaigns warning consumers about the risks of lead-generation practices that encourage them to switch their super into high-risk investments.
And we are increasingly promoting our investor alert list, which is being updated constantly as a result of the roughly 130 websites we are having taken down each week as part of our work to disrupt investment scams.
Rebuilding and refreshing Moneysmart
And while we are using Moneysmart in different ways, we also recognise that Moneysmart itself needs to change, which is why we have committed to rebuild and refresh it.
In doing so, I do want to tell you that we are starting from a strong base. With 11.7 million visitors in the last financial year, Moneysmart holds a firm position as a source of independent financial information.
But we think it can do even more.
To inform our thinking, over the past 12 months we have commissioned extensive consumer research – which many of you contributed to - to help us understand:
- how Australians feel about their current level of financial knowledge
- their levels of interest in knowing more, and
- their experiences and perceptions of Moneysmart.
At a high level, this research has told us that:
- only 26% of Australians over the age of 18 consider themselves to be ‘very knowledgeable’ on money and financial matters[1]
- 75% would like to be more knowledgeable[2]
- only 4% of people in Australia can spontaneously recall Moneysmart when searching for organisations with financial information or advice[3]. So lots of people are getting there, but they don’t necessarily recall it if they’re not prompted.
- but, when they have used Moneysmart, 93% report a positive experience[4].
Alongside that general research, we have also commissioned targeted research on the knowledge and needs of people approaching retirement, which is part of new funding that we’ve got from the Australian government to do more work in that area.
Informed by all of this research, we have developed a new Moneysmart strategy to drive its renewal over the next three years.
If you have visited Moneysmart’s website or social channels recently, you probably started to see some of those changes, whether that’s the website or our social media channels, and you’ll start to see more over the coming months.
A big part of this is the approach to social media that I hope some of you have started to see which is about publishing more relevant content, more frequently. That’s already driving growth and engagement in our social channels.
I would say on the topic of retirement we have recently released a new version of our retirement planner, which is one of the most popular calculators on Moneysmart.
And towards the end of next week, we’ll be launching a new ‘retirement hub’ with a range of content resources to help Australians planning for retirement, and you’ll see more coming over the next year.
Conclusion
So that’s just a brief ‘skate over’ of how we’re thinking about our work in this area and some of the improvements that we’re working on.
Before finishing up, I want to say that we can’t do this alone at ASIC.
We know that Moneysmart does its best work as part of a network of individuals and organisations who share the same goal: a financial system where consumers are treated fairly, and where they are equipped with the knowledge that they need to assert their rights.
We may each pursue that goal in different ways, but we do so with the knowledge that financial literacy not only delivers better outcomes for individuals – it also brings substantial and measurable benefits to the broader community and economy.
So, thank you Ecstra for bringing this group together today, and for inviting us to be part of the conversation. I hope that this event allows all of us to return to our organisations with new energy, new ideas and new hope.
[1] (2025) Moneysmart nationally representative research into Australians’ financial needs
[2] (2025) Moneysmart nationally representative research into Australians’ financial needs
