The Corporations Amendment (Register of Relevant Providers) Regulation 2015 states that an AFS licensee must lodge a notice with ASIC for every person who provides personal financial product advice to retail clients on its behalf (whether that person is an employee, officer or an authorised representative) that contains the following information:

  • name;
  • date and place of birth;
  • authorising licensee's name and AFSL number;
  • details of the authorised representative who authorised the adviser (if applicable);
  • the year in which the adviser first provided personal financial product advice to retail clients;
  • relevant ABNs;
  • details of the financial products in which the adviser is authorised to give personal financial product advice, or class of product advice, to retail clients;
  • the recent advising history of the adviser for the 5 years prior to the notice being lodged (i.e. the details of any licensee that authorised the adviser during the prior 5 years); and
  • information about relevant qualifications, training courses and memberships of professional bodies.

A natural person who holds an AFS licence will also have their details included on the register. However, an adviser that provides personal advice to retail clients that relates only to basic banking products, general insurance products or consumer credit insurance (or a combination of those products) will not be captured on the register. The register will also contain a range of information about bannings, disqualifications, suspensions and enforceable undertakings under the corporations, credit and superannuation laws. ASIC will populate these areas of the register directly from its records of such events.

This is a lot of information to gather, especially if you have a proportion of new advisers who will have to provide their recent advising history. ASIC has advised that licensees will not have to gather information about the qualifications, training courses and professional memberships until late May 2015. ASIC is allowing all affected licensees to choose a 'start date' for the notification regime between 1 January and 30 March 2015. Your start date is the date at which you will evaluate all financial advisers authorised under your AFSL and start to gather the information that you will have to lodge with ASIC.

These notices will need to be lodged between 9 - 30 March for all current advisers authorised under your AFSL at your selected start date. For any advisers that commenced between the start date and 30 March 2015, the notices must be lodged by 30 April 2015. For any advisers that commenced after 30 March 2015, you have 30 business days to lodge the notice via ASIC's portal.

So, if you hired a large number of financial advisers in February of this year, you may wish to make your start date 31 January so that you have additional time to gather the information and submit notices for the new advisers. The lodgement fee will be $43 per adviser.

The new Register will not replace the obligation to notify ASIC of the appointment of an authorised representative. However, the process of appointing authorised representatives will change and include new online forms.

Affected licensees should have received a letter from ASIC a couple of weeks ago detailing the implementation timeline. This gives you a lot of detail about exactly when you will have to lodge notices in a range of situations, so we suggest you keep this letter for future reference.

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.