ASIC says simplification push cuts paper lodgements and targets clearer regulatory guidance
Australia’s corporate regulator says it has made progress on a multi-year effort to simplify its rules, guidance and digital services, after industry groups warned that regulatory complexity was increasing costs, slowing innovation and creating unnecessary barriers for firms and consumers.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission released its Regulatory Simplification Progress Report in May 2026, setting out changes made since its earlier consultation on regulatory simplification. The program covers website redesign, electronic lodgement, electronic signatures, guidance updates, regulatory roadmaps, legislative instrument consolidation and work with other regulators to reduce duplicated reporting.
ASIC Chair Joseph Longo said the regulator had made “meaningful improvements” over the past year in how people interact with ASIC. The agency said the objective is to simplify areas within its control while maintaining consumer protection and market confidence.
One of the biggest changes is ASIC’s redesigned website, launched in June 2025. The regulator said it removed hundreds of repetitive or confusing pages from the business and companies section, rewrote content for clearer use and improved search tools.
By the end of 2025, ASIC had revised more than 280 form landing pages, published new online services content and improved access to current and superseded regulatory instruments through search and filtering. In 2026, it plans further work on search tools and user-specific content pathways.
ASIC has also reviewed formal guidance. From December 2024 to December 2025, it updated 18 regulatory guides and withdrew 11 outdated guides or guides already folded into other materials. It also reduced 8 Product Disclosure Statement guidance documents, totaling 124 pages, into 1 guide of 47 pages.
The regulator said it has developed a Regulatory Guidance Strategy focused on clearer drafting, navigation and format. That includes clearer headings, examples, plain English, tagging and improved landing pages.
Another major area is legislative instruments, which ASIC uses to provide relief from legal requirements or clarify how laws apply. ASIC said it adopted best-practice drafting principles in September 2025 and is now simplifying platform instruments, financial reporting instruments and audit relief instruments.
ASIC said it plans to create 1 simplified platforms instrument, 1 consolidated financial reporting instrument and 1 consolidated audit instrument.
Digital lodgement has also expanded. ASIC said 88 forms are now available for electronic lodgement, a 380% increase in electronic channels. The change avoids around 45,000 paper lodgements each year.
The regulator’s target is to enable electronic lodgement for 90% of paper-only forms by the end of June 2026. It has also enabled electronic signatures on approved PDF forms and expanded email lodgement from 23 paper forms to 58 in 2025, then to 88 after adding 30 more forms in April 2026.
ASIC said its longer-term plan is to move away from fragmented paper-based processes toward more secure digital services. Its RegistryConnect program is expected to improve company search, introduce new authentication and authorization requirements, streamline applications and registrations, and support machine-to-machine users.
ASIC also launched a new Professional Registers Search in December 2024, allowing users to search professional register databases through 1 service instead of separate registers. It plans to add banned and disqualified searches in 2026.
In May 2025, ASIC introduced a digital Australian financial services licence dashboard through the ASIC Regulatory Portal. The dashboard allows licensees to submit and vary applications, cancel licences and notify ASIC of certain licence-related changes. ASIC said the tool reduces manual entry by pre-filling application details and removing some duplicate document uploads.
The report also addresses complaints about reporting burden. ASIC said it has improved engagement with industry before issuing data requests or notices during thematic surveillance. It also committed, as part of a Council of Financial Regulators review, to halve internal dispute resolution reporting for small banks from 2 reports a year to 1.
ASIC and APRA are also reviewing the Financial Accountability Regime and whether reporting forms should change. ASIC said it is working with APRA to reduce duplication, improve regulator planning and strengthen engagement with industry.
Stakeholder feedback shaped much of the next phase. ASIC received 44 submissions on its earlier simplification report, including 39 non-confidential and 5 confidential responses. Financial services and advice, and credit and banking, were the largest respondent groups, each representing 18% of submissions.
Respondents broadly supported the program but asked ASIC to go further. Website-related suggestions included searching within ASIC instruments, using artificial intelligence in search and creating obligation roadmaps that show users what rules apply and when.
ASIC said it may experiment with AI to improve website content discoverability, subject to funding.
Stakeholders also asked for more practical regulatory roadmaps. ASIC consulted on pilot roadmaps for small company directors and financial advice providers. It said more detailed versions are expected by the end of June 2026.
The report also highlights frustration with the reportable situations regime. ASIC said many submissions argued the regime forces firms to report minor or technical breaches with limited consumer benefit. ASIC supports removing small banks from automatic reporting of certain breaches and considering whether similar treatment should apply to other licensees.
ASIC said it will keep working with Treasury on possible law reform covering reportable situations, substantial holding notices, digital disclosure, design and distribution obligations and hawking rules. However, it said major legislative reform remains a matter for the Australian Government.
Its next 6-month priorities include clearer guidance, further consolidation of instruments, improved service expectations, stronger global website search, work with APRA to reduce data duplication and support for productivity-related law reform.
Why ASIC’s Real Test Is Whether Simpler Rules Actually Feel Simpler
This is the kind of regulatory update that sounds boring until you hit the numbers.
88 forms now available electronically.
45,000 paper lodgements avoided each year.
A 380% increase in forms available through electronic channels.
That is not cosmetic. That is operational friction being cut out of the system.
And I think that matters more than the usual “better guidance” language regulators like to use. Businesses do not experience regulation as theory. They experience it through forms, portals, broken search tools, duplicated reports, vague guidance and hours lost trying to work out which rule applies.
So yes, ASIC’s simplification push is dry.
But dry does not mean irrelevant.
The interesting part is the tension. ASIC is trying to simplify without looking like it is deregulating. That is a narrow path. Too much simplification, and consumer groups worry protections are being diluted. Too little, and industry says nothing has changed except the font on the website.
My read: ASIC has done the easy-to-measure work first.
Website pages removed. Forms digitized. Guides consolidated. Search improved.
Useful? Yes.
Transformational? Not yet.
The harder test comes next.
Can a small company director actually understand their obligations without hiring a lawyer for every basic compliance question? Can a financial advice firm avoid reporting low-value technical breaches that help nobody? Can small banks spend less time feeding duplicated data into regulators and more time managing actual risk?
That is where this either becomes a real productivity story or just another government clean-up exercise.
The reportable situations regime is the pressure point. If firms are reporting minor breaches because the system punishes silence more than noise, the regulator ends up with more data but not better insight. That is a classic compliance trap.
More reporting does not always mean safer markets.
Sometimes it just means everyone is drowning in low-quality signals.
The AI search idea is also worth watching. ASIC is right to be cautious, but this is exactly where AI could help if done properly. Not replacing law. Not giving fake certainty. But helping users find the right guidance faster.
Because right now, regulatory complexity often hides in navigation. The rule may exist. The guide may exist. The answer may exist. But if a business cannot find it, the system still fails.
The best part of ASIC’s report is not that it claims victory. It does not. It shows the regulator knows the pain points: duplicated data requests, unclear guidance, hard-to-search instruments, fragmented digital services, outdated PDFs, paper forms that should have died years ago.
The weak spot is control.
ASIC can simplify what it owns. But many of the real problems sit in legislation, cross-regulator reporting and policy choices that require Treasury or government action. That means ASIC can clean the pipes, but it cannot redesign the whole plumbing system alone.
That matters.
Because if the law itself stays messy, a cleaner ASIC website only gets you so far.