On 29 June 2026, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) issued Report 833 – Safeguarding super: How well are platform trustees monitoring risks to retirement savings?

ASIC and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority have been concerned about gaps in trustees’ oversight of advisers, advice licensees and investments that are made available to members. The report sets out ASIC’s findings following a review of six superannuation platform trustees to see how they monitored potential risks to retirement savings. The report outlines key findings and actions trustees can take to improve how they monitor financial advisers, advice licensees, and investment options to safeguard members’ superannuation.

Key message

The key message from ASIC is that whilst it saw some pleasing examples of uplift since its previous reviews, ASIC was overwhelmingly disappointed with the lack of progress in key areas. These included trustees’ oversight of advice fee deductions and fee-related conduct, and monitoring of holding limits and options on their investment menus. Overall, ASIC found that trustees are still not doing enough to protect members from harmful advice fee deductions and inappropriate investments on their platforms.

ASIC’s review identified the following areas requiring immediate attention from trustees:

  • Persistent gaps in advice fee controls, which in some cases have regressed over the past two years. One trustee proposed a fee cap of $30,000 — well beyond caps identified in ASIC Report 781 ‘Review of superannuation trustee practices: Protecting members from harmful advice charges’.
  • Limited checks of advice documents with half of the trustees reporting they did not conduct any checks for at least one of the months in ASIC’s review period.
  • Insufficient focus on understanding the advice licensees’ business models, including whether they use lead generators or other third‑party referral sources.
  • Inadequate monitoring of key risk indicators, such as member churn, patterns in fees, holding limits and unusual fund flows.

Next steps

Throughout the report, ASIC identifies examples of better practice and principles for strategic monitoring that can help trustees to better protect their members’ retirement savings, based on ASIC’s observations from its reviews. These examples and associated actions are listed in Table 1 to the report. ASIC urges all trustees, including non-platform trustees, to review their current practices against this list.

Where trustees have concerns about inappropriate switching activity or potential misconduct, they should urgently report it to ASIC for further investigation. This includes where trustees observe unusual or concerning patterns in members switching away from their fund (for example, by reviewing third-party authority data). Trustees should also make use of industry forums and other available channels for sharing information with other trustees to quickly disrupt inappropriate switching business models.