One trustee found something suspicious about a representative of an advice licensee, and then did nothing for 13 months. In that time, another representative of the same licensee put through rollover applications carrying the falsified signatures of a dead adviser.
The case sits in ASIC Report 833, the regulator’s review of six platform trustees that look after over $300 billion in retirement savings, roughly three quarters of all money held by platform trustees. Simone Constant, the ASIC commissioner, called it “a clear breach of trust” when trustees skip basic protections such as studying how an advice licensee earns its money before it is let onto the platform.
What the review found
Four weak spots stood out.
Advice fee controls were patchy, and in some cases had slipped back over two years. One trustee proposed a cap of $30,000. The Age, in a column by Bec Wilson, reported that another admitted to $25,000, and that ASIC had called caps as high as $20,000 too generous in an earlier report. Wilson wrote that Constant had told her of one adviser who targeted members with balances of around $10,000, and that on average half of those balances went in fees.
Document checks were thin. Half the trustees said they did no checks at all in at least one month of the review period. According to The Age, one trustee ran 21 checks across a 15-month review, and 75 per cent of those turned up problems. Constant found it hard to excuse: a monthly check rate of zero, at trustees whose results had shown a 75% adverse finding rate.
Third, trustees paid little attention to how advice licensees make money, for example whether the licensees buy leads or take clients from outside referrers. Fourth, the warning signs went unwatched: member churn, fee patterns, holding limits, unusual fund flows. Some trustees leaned on “limited, almost entirely manual indicators.”
Growth outran oversight
The sector the platforms operate in has swelled. Over the decade ending June 2025, money held for platform members went from $123 billion up to $396 billion, more than three times as much, while the wider super sector a little more than doubled. Advice fees charged through platforms rose four-fold to $2.3 billion.
Constant said the warnings had been plain, including from APRA, and that the collapses of two funds, Shield and First Guardian, took around $1 billion from over 11,000 Australians. The lessons, she said, had not been learned. Trustees “should not expose their members’ retirement savings to unacceptable risks in the pursuit of volume growth.”
Enforcement already under way
ASIC has taken Equity Trustees to court seeking civil penalties over Shield, and has done the same to Diversa Trustees over First Guardian. A further case against Equity Trustees, started last month, questions its decision to let members put money into First Guardian. In March 2026 the Federal Court found Macquarie Investment Management Limited had broken corporate law because it never placed Shield under heightened monitoring. Macquarie had already paid affected members about $321 million, in September 2025. Netwealth has agreed to compensate over 1,000 First Guardian investors with more than $100 million.
“Where we identify significant non-compliance, we will not hesitate to exercise our regulatory powers, including enforcement action,” Constant said.
Sources
- 26-135MR ASIC calls platform trustees to account over persistent failures to safeguard super savings (ASIC media release)
- Our super system has a new blind spot, and it could cost you thousands (Bec Wilson, The Age)
