91AV

Check against delivery

Thank you very much. It’s lovely to be here, everybody – and good afternoon.

I would like to start by acknowledging that we are on Ngunnawal country – and I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today.

Thank you for having me as part of the conference. I’m here on behalf of the 91AV and Investments Commission – and we are Australia’s corporate, markets, financial services and consumer credit regulator.

You probably mainly read about us in the news for our regulatory or enforcement activities. But today I want to focus on another important part of what ASIC does – and that’s in relation to the stewardship that we have of an expansive collection of publicly accessible databases.

I want to spend some time explaining to you what these databases are and how they comprise a central pillar of Australia’s economic infrastructure.

I can think of no more fitting a place to talk about this than our nation’s capital. Because I do think of these databases as a national asset – and here we’re surrounded by national assets. We've got Parliament House, the High Court and the National Library.

Our national asset isn’t visible, it’s digital. But, like these other monuments, it's a testament to the Australian economy, how we run it and some of our values – and the way our economy thrives.

So, like I say, ASIC’s data assets are less tangible, but I hope by the end of my presentation you can see just how valuable they are.

I will focus particularly on their value for government agencies because a lot of you here are from government agencies. But I’ll also step through their value for commerce, for businesses and also for consumers.

It’s the fact of their public accessibility that makes these assets very valuable. A lot of agencies have closed databases. But the databases I am going to be talking about today are publicly accessible.

So, these datasets have that role of facilitating commerce and consumer activity – and promoting corporate transparency and accountability. I mention that, because that leads to trust – and trust is the foundation on which our economy – and government services – are built.

ASIC’s publicly accessible datasets

I’m going to start by focusing on the ASIC companies and business names registers. But there are actually a lot of others as well. There’s a real depth and diversity.

So, as you can see from this ^[1], we've got a lot of databases. They’re varied – and each of them contains a wealth of information that can give meaningful insights into the health of our economy.

Registry datasets

To sample some of these intangible treasures, we'll start with the Registry datasets.

ASIC administers 32 registers – and you’ll see these on the slide under the Registry heading. They’re the official source of information about companies, business names, and people and organisations who are registered or licensed to operate financial services businesses in Australia.

In the last financial year, we had 343 million searches across these registers. In the same period, we had 3.1 million updates, and more than 303,000 new companies and 386,000 new business names were registered. So, they’re busy registers.

The largest of our registers is the Australian Companies Register – and it contains both current and historical information in relation to 3.39 million companies. So, this is the real beating heart of the Australian economy.

On this register we have company status and type, as well as the company’s directors and officeholders. The information about the people who lead companies includes their names, addresses and other information. We also have share structure, ultimate holding company and a list of publicly accessible documents lodged.

Some companies – not all of them, certainly not all 3.39 million of them – need to lodge financial reports with us, depending on their size. So, some additional financial information is available for some companies.

The second in size is the Business Names Register with 2.84 million entries. Similarly, you can get publicly accessible information there.  

The next category is the professional registers – much smaller in size, but really important as a means of facilitating financial services in Australia.

These registers capture the people and firms who give you financial advice, AFSLs (Australian Financial Services licensees), credit, auditors, liquidators – a lot of the professional and financial services in our economy.

So, people use these – and I’ll come to some examples later – if they’re trying to find, for example, a financial adviser.

There's a long list of datasets on the slide under banned and disqualified. So, they're who you don't want to be engaging for financial services or otherwise – and that's both people and organisations. 

Other datasets

On the other column on this first slide, we’ve got our non-Registry datasets – and, at the top there, insolvency.

You’ll often see insolvency statistics from ASIC that are quoted when people are talking about the health of the economy – or particular sectors or geographies. They really are an important indicator of the health of an economy – and in identifying pressure points as well.

We release corporate insolvencies statistics weekly (two weeks in arrears). So, it’s pretty current data – and there are some commentators and, indeed, economists who look really closely at that information.

We also publish lists from registered liquidators – quarterly and annual statistics about liquidations that we get from the reports that registered liquidators send to us.

Our has over one million hits a year and that's around company deregistrations and external administrations.

The enforcement-related datasets include the Court Enforceable Undertakings Register, Infringement Notices Register and Markets Disciplinary Panel Outcomes Register.

On markets, there's quite a long list. I'm not sure if we've got any market specialists here. These contain really granular data. For example the short position reports table and quarterly equity market data. Because ASIC is the markets regulator as well.

On the consumer side, we've got many consumer-facing datasets such as our . So that's entities and websites that we think are a scam or otherwise untrustworthy.

We also have public warning notices about conduct in relation to financial services.

The last one to mention is what we call our – through Moneysmart. There’s around $2 billion in lost shares, bank accounts and life insurance – and the unclaimed money search is the avenue through which you go to see if you've got money owed. Some of you might go and have a look later. There might be some money to be claimed there.

We had 12 million visits to our Moneysmart site in 2024, with 1.2 million going to the unclaimed money search particularly.

How these datasets are being accessed, their users and uses

I'm going to move now to discuss how these databases are accessed, who the key users are and their uses.

So, beyond checking for a possible windfall, what other value do these datasets bring?

As you can see from this next slide, we can group our users into three main categories: government and government agencies; companies and businesses; and consumers and the community.

In terms of access, there's a couple of different ways in. We’ve got the ASIC website, portal, the , and there’s , which directs to some of the ASIC data as well.

Then there are means by which people can receive regular updates. If you have an interest in a specific company, you can get email notifications from us, if the company lodges a document, for example. We also have company notices in our gazettes.

Others with more complex requirements – so for large volumes of data – can engage an ASIC-approved information broker. They have the capacity to retrieve really big chunks of data from our registers – and also from other government agencies. Then there can be insights drawn from the combined datasets.

Government and government agencies

So, homing in particularly on government and government agencies.

We share Registry data with about 80 federal, state and local agencies. So, some of you here might be regular consumers of our data.

This is often sent as a series of bulk data files, that are extracted from the registers. That's, of course, depending on the agency’s needs. Then they can load it up and do the analytics to filter, search and match.

This is used for regulatory purposes, enforcement purposes, to support investigations or indeed for statistical purposes. It may have implications for national security. So, in the detection and disruption of serious financial crime, ASIC data often is an important component of that work.

In terms of data analytics – how the datasets are interpreted to extract those actionable insights – there are hundreds of examples. But one is the ATO, who use our data to look for non-compliance across a range of different areas – including director ID.

ASIC too uses its own datasets – these ones as well as internal ones – for regulatory and enforcement purposes. For example, we’ve used the ASIC registers to interrogate the legitimacy of a series of companies we think are linked to international scam syndicates.

So, something that a lot of people across both Commonwealth and other agencies are fighting is scams – and we've been able to use Registry data as part of those efforts.

We’ve been using machine learning and advanced analytics for some time. We haven't yet focused this as much on our Registry data, but we can see opportunities in that space.

We also are exploring the use of artificial intelligence to assess the high volumes of reports of misconduct and reportable situations that we receive. So, we’re really looking for financial harms. Then we can take regulatory or enforcement action – and scams is a good example.

Companies and businesses 

Turning to the second of our user groups: companies and businesses.

The first thing to note about the registers is that they're actually the basis on which a company comes to be. To be registered is to get company status or business name status. For companies that allows for limited liability and all the good things that flow from that, as the primary corporate form in our economy. 

But, also, the registers are really important as a means of performing due diligence.

If a company wants to contract with another, you need to know it exists. So before entering commercial arrangements or engaging professional services, our registers are frequently searched.

Similarly for loans and access to credit, banks and lenders access our datasets to inform lending decisions – and commercial credit agencies use our data all the time as well.

Consumers and the community

The third user group is consumers and the community.

I mentioned Moneysmart, but we've also got other datasets that support protection from financial fraud, scams and unlicensed entities.

Our contains the details of domestic and international entities that we think are operating without a license or an exemption or are impostor entities, who impersonate proper corporate actors in our economy.

We update this list regularly. We have an associated activity, which is our investment scam website takedown work. That’s a service whereby websites that we've identified as a scam get taken down.

So far, we’ve got over 2,700 entries on our investor alert list.

Consumers use our datasets for due diligence as well. So, checking before they invest, finding out if someone’s banned or otherwise, are ways that consumers can help protect themselves and make good financial decisions.

Journalists

A valuable subset of consumers and the community, who use our Registry data, are journalists. Smaller in number, but big in impact.

Since a legal change in 2019, journalists are exempt from certain Registry fees. I call this out, because it's another public interest basis for the Registry datasets.

So, the registers are really important, as part of the media in Australia.

Improvements in the pipeline

So that's what we've got and how it's used.

The third part of what I wanted to speak to you about this afternoon are some of the new things or changes that we've got planned in relation to these datasets.

Adding new datasets

The first thing to note is that we're adding a couple of new datasets.

The first to mention is internal dispute resolution (IDR) data. It sounds very specific. But financial services firms, those who have a financial services license, are required to have an internal dispute resolution function. In relation to that, they need to keep records of what complaints they’ve had and how they’ve resolved them.

One of the improvements that we've recently made is to get all that internal dispute resolution data coming more systematically through to ASIC. We've been building an IDR data reporting framework, so we can then publish it back to the community. There's been many years of work to record, improve and standardise that information.

So, like I said, the requirement to report applies to all financial firms. So far, we've been releasing that data in tranches at an aggregate level. There were 4.7 million reported complaints in 2023/24.

We’ve been using that data for regulatory purposes and now what we're going to do is publish that on an entity-by-entity basis – so that there's increased transparency.

Exactly how we're going to publish it, we're going to consult on. I’m sure many of you can appreciate exactly what that looks like. It can be quite granular and important.

That consultation process will commence soon. We're going to couple with it with a consultation on how we publish what we call reportable situations data, so that refers to breach reporting.

So again, financial services firms have to collect information, where they’ve identified themselves that they've breached the law, and provide that to us.

Enhancing existing datasets

The second improvement is enhancing some of the existing datasets.

We really want the data we’ve got to be robust and accessible – and we think there's definitely uplift available. Really, that's in light of just how many decisions are being made off the back of this information.

We also want to make it simpler for people to comply with their obligations in giving us information – and also in understanding it.

If we deliver a better experience for users, if there's greater automation or other ways of providing information or accessing it, that can improve consumer and corporate outcomes, but also regulatory outcomes as well.

We recognise the need for improvement to our public interfaces. We know that they're not particularly user-friendly and that can erode value and trust if we don't keep improving the datasets that we've got.

RegistryConnect

We're happy to say that we recently received funding for the next tranche of the program we call RegistryConnect – and that's really to continue to deliver reliable, secure, trusted and efficient Registry services to support the economy.

It’s worth pointing out that, while we have a lot of registers, there are others across the Commonwealth agencies. Particularly the ATO, who've got the director ID register and the Australian Business Register (ABR). For people in the room who’ve got an ABN, you go to the ATO for that. So, we call it RegistryConnect because it's about bringing registers together as well – including across agencies.

There will be some heavy lifting for us in delivering the RegistryConnect program. But some of these efforts are well underway. We've got some old technology that we're stabilising. But we're also looking very much to improvements in the data and that's what I'll focus on here.

An immediate priority will be enhancing data quality and integrity. We've got situations where some of our data is fragmented or duplicated in relation, for example, to people. There are some inaccurate ABN linkages in the Companies Register and also fraudulent addresses. So, these are the things that we need to resolve.

There are also minor inaccuracies in people's names, dates of birth, addresses, initials, misspellings, those sorts of things. These are smaller issues, but still really important to get right.

We want to uplift that data, where we can. There are some legislative constraints on how much we can change what’s been given to us. But within those, we are really keen to uplift the data.

We're going to be enhancing our processes for authentication and authorisation when people come in or on to the register. So that will also help prevent some of the errors and inaccuracies as it comes in and also help reduce fraudulent interactions.

I mentioned before the ATO. An important part of what we're doing is linking the data on director ID, which is in their register, with the Companies Register. So, at the moment, you'll have a company with the names of directors, but it doesn't yet have their numbers.

Bringing those two datasets together is a really important part of what we've just been given funding for. We call that director ID linking. That will move in time through to a process by which when a company is registered, they'll give us the director ID information then and we can also have a process for updating information about directors.

Lots of you will probably have a director ID – or some of you will. It's a unique identifier that people have for life.

By having it on the Companies Register, that will help ASIC and others identify director conflicts, patterns of common stewardship of corporate entities, histories of involvement either in successful companies or in insolvencies, poor business conduct and/or information around the types of companies people have been involved in – if they're making decisions about whether to contract with someone or use them as a financial services licensee, as I said before.

So, this will be great for us as a regulator – and an example might be detecting and disrupting insider trading. At the moment, we can see a director’s history, but it takes an enormous amount of effort. This will be a much more straightforward opportunity for us. So, our work on illegal phoenixing or scams will be enhanced through this.

So, good for the regulator. But, we hope very much, good for the users as well, the people who have to input information, provide it or update it.

As I said earlier, it's not always user-friendly and we're working for it to be better for our users. We’re trying to include validation at point of data input and collection. That will help people give the right information, right from the start – so there's less need for corrections.

So that's good for everybody, we think. For regulators. But also, for the people who are providing the information and, from our perspective, for the economy as a whole.

It’s still early days in the RegistryConnect program, where our focus has been on stabilising some of the technology. But we've got some fantastic plans in place and we’re really looking forward to the improvements that I've described today.

Conclusion

So earlier, I referred to our publicly accessible datasets as a precious national asset – and it's hard to put a value on something that's intangible. But there are figures that we use to give a sense of what can be achieved.

One figure I’d draw to your attention is $4.89 billion. That's the estimated annual impact of illegal phoenixing activity^[2]. So, if we get better at identifying and addressing illegal phoenixing, there's a significant uplift for the economy and improved trust in the economy, as well, between people.

There's dozens of other metrics that we could use. But really, I think, the value here is in what people use it for. I hope in describing some of these datasets to you, you are interested in what ASIC has – and interested to explore some of these datasets.

So, I really hope that you explore and treasure this data – just like we do – and I'm keen to answer any questions that you have. Thank you.

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^[1] Snapshot only: ASIC’s key publicly accessible datasets.

^[2] .