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As Australia moves towards a new regulatory regime for payment service providers (PSPs), the regulator’s focus on pricing, reporting and exploiting financial difficulty challenges organisations to embed stronger controls and forward-looking governance.
Announcing its on November 13, 2025, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reiterated that its goal is “to help all Australians through promoting market integrity and consumer protection in the Australian financial system”.
’s&Բ;updated priorities comprise a mixture of new and continuing areas of focus.
Given the regulator’s broad responsibilities, which include oversight of organisations in the superannuation, managed funds and insurance sectors, not all of its priorities are relevant to PSPs.
However, payments firms will be affected by ASIC’s emphasis on tackling misleading pricing practices and financial reporting misconduct.
As in many countries, the cost of living is an issue in Australia, and ASIC intends to focus on ensuring fairness in the pricing of financial services. For PSPs, this will mean scrutiny of payment processing fees and surcharges, foreign exchange margins and spreads, and late payment fees and penalty charges.
The regulator’s clampdown on financial reporting misconduct will focus in particular on failures to lodge financial reports. PSPs will need to ensure they meet their obligations under their Australian Financial Services Licence (AFSL), including audited financial-statement requirements, ongoing disclosures for listed entities and timely regulatory-return submissions.
An ongoing priority for ASIC is addressing misconduct exploiting financial difficulty, particularly predatory credit practices. In the payments sector, this means focusing on areas such as buy now, pay later (BNPL) service terms and collections, debt collection through payment systems and hardship provisions for payment plans.
ASIC said that its enforcement priorities for 2026 are intended to send a clear signal to the market about where it plans to focus its resources and expertise next year.
Sarah Court, the regulator’s deputy chair, said the priorities have been designed to protect consumers from financial harm and uphold the integrity of Australia’s financial markets.
“We are continuing to deliver strong, visible and active enforcement outcomes,” she added. “We’re doing more investigations, taking more matters to court and securing record penalties.”
Consumer protection
On September 19, 2025, Australia’s received royal assent, marking a significant milestone in regulatory reform in the country.
The legislation is designed to expand the payments regulatory framework to encompass new and emerging payment systems and participants, including digital wallets, BNPL services and crypto-asset payment facilitators.
The bill is to commence on December 20, 2025, the day after the end of a three-month period beginning the day it received royal assent.
As Australia modernises its payments system, it is seeking to ensure a balance between fostering innovation and maintaining system stability.
ASIC will play a key role in holding financial services organisations to account, conducting investigations of PSPs’ activities and taking enforcement action where appropriate.
Court said: “ASIC will zero in on misleading pricing practices in the financial services sector, particularly those that make everyday costs harder for Australians.”
PSPs face a series of challenges in remaining compliant. With payments technology evolving rapidly, firms must ensure that systems and processes align with their reporting obligations.
As artificial intelligence (AI) tools play a greater role in administration and decision-making, PSPs will need to ensure that their decisions are fair, explainable and appropriately governed. In addition, real-time payments create real-time compliance demands, which PSPs must factor into their service-development plans.
Simplification and clarity
In a report on published in September 2025, ASIC stated that it had removed more than 9,240 pages of regulatory material since the start of the year.
Part of the thinking behind its streamlining process was to enable PSPs to focus less on procedural complexity and more on developing new products and enhancing the customer experience.
The other side of this coin, however, is the regulator’s ongoing responsibility for ensuring that payments firms treat customers fairly and do not exploit vulnerable consumers.
PSPs reviewing ASIC’s 2026 enforcement priorities may consider following the regulator’s example by simplifying pricing and strengthening clarity in their internal processes.
They should seek to ensure that all customer-facing fee disclosures, regardless of channel, are clear and accurate, mapping the end-to-end customer journey to identify where fees appear.
A longer-term objective may be to simplify fee structures and introduce tools such as real-time fee calculators or estimators.
To strengthen their financial reporting, PSPs should assess their compliance processes to ensure that all AFSL reporting obligations are current and that regulatory returns are timely and accurate.
Although a natural response to ASIC’s enforcement priorities is to be concerned about potential failings, PSPs should also be mindful that compliance can offer a competitive advantage.
A reputation for transparency and trust is a valuable brand differentiator, and firms that engage proactively with the regulator on emerging issues can help to develop industry standards.
Similarly, although embracing cutting-edge technology can introduce risk, using AI tools in monitoring, pricing and anomalous price detection can help to provide the level of customer service that ASIC is aiming to promote.
