Australia must move faster to adopt new financial market technologies or risk falling behind other countries, Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) chair Joe Longo has warned.
Speaking at the Tech Council of Australia’s Future of Innovation in Australia’s Financial Markets event in Sydney on 21 May, Longo said ASIC had launched new research showing innovation was now affecting nearly every part of the global financial sector.
“AI, automation, and digital platforms are fundamentally reshaping how our financial system operates. And as these technological changes accelerate, Australia’s challenge is not simply to keep up. We have to be ahead of the game.”
Longo said Australia had a record of financial and technological innovation, pointing to Wi-Fi, polymer banknotes, the bionic ear, buy-now-pay-later services pioneered by Afterpay, and the New Payments Platform and PayTo infrastructure. He said the NPP recorded more than 1.82 billion real-time payments in 2025.
However, Longo said ingenuity and investment were not enough without institutions that allowed innovation to develop. In Australia’s case, he said that role partly falls to ASIC, which he described as wanting to be “backers, not blockers, of financial innovation”.
He pointed to several ASIC initiatives aimed at giving new financial technologies clearer pathways into the market. The regulator has been involved in the Reserve Bank’s Project Acacia and has committed to continuing work with the RBA and other Council of Financial Regulators agencies on a potential digital financial market infrastructure sandbox. ASIC is also exploring pathways from regulatory sandbox arrangements to licensing for start-ups.
Those efforts will continue in the near term, with Longo saying ASIC would host a Financial Markets Innovation roundtable and publish further research on capital market innovation and tokenisation in June.
But he warned that regulatory support would only matter if Australia moved quickly enough. While the country leads in areas such as buy-now-pay-later regulation and real-time payments infrastructure, Longo said it was already lagging in others.
“Technology is moving faster than any of us can comprehend—although I have to say, there are people in this room whose level of comprehension is pretty good—and if we miss the boat, there is a real risk that we will fall behind,” Longo said.
He pointed to overseas examples to show how quickly those gaps could translate into practical differences for consumers. In the United States, he said insurtech company Lemonade uses machine-learning models to process claims in under three seconds. In Australia, by contrast, complaints about motor vehicle insurance have risen because of claims handling delays.
He also cited Betterment, a robo-advisory platform that provides automated advice at a lower cost than traditional advice. Longo said demand for financial advice in Australia was increasing as the population ages, with adviser numbers needing to more than double by 2055 just to maintain current coverage.
For Longo, those examples pointed to a broader economic risk.
“We are in a global innovation race. If we do not embrace new market technologies now, we could be poorer for it as a nation in the future. We may well end up with a ‘lost generation’ of Australians, consigned to a poorer standard of living because we did not act upon these opportunities,” Longo said, adding that risk made regulation part of the solution.
Longo said Australia needed rules that allow new financial technologies to develop while still holding firms accountable for how they are governed and used. He said ASIC had spent the past 18 months working on regulatory simplification, describing the initiative as an ongoing priority.
At the same time, he said industry participation would also be necessary to move innovation forward. Longo cited ASIC’s recent tokenisation survey, where around half the market declined to participate or meet with the regulator, while only one-third provided detailed feedback.
“We cannot let complacency chart our future. That is why we must continue to work together to break down barriers around innovation. This challenge is bigger than any of us alone can tackle.”
