AUSTRALIA: ASIC releases ASX assessment report

Thursday May 23 2013

ASIC has released its annual assessment report of the ASX Group (ASX) licensees. The assessment covers 1 November 2011 to 30 June 2012 and pays attention to how ASX dealt with a number of specific issues, including:

• the sufficiency of ASX’s technological resources, in particular following the outage to its market announcements platform on 9 October 2012
• its approach to dealing with long-term suspended entities, and
• its processes for reviewing prospectuses.

The report sets out a number of areas the ASX has agreed to address, working closely with ASIC. While important, these issues did not cause ASIC to qualify the conclusion that ASX adequately met its obligations for the assessment period.

The agreed actions from this report deal with:

• Technology – While ASIC was satisfied with ASX’s operational response to the market announcements platform outage, we question the approach it took to keeping all market users adequately informed. ASX has agreed to review its communication procedures, including the timing of future communications about system issues to market participants and other market users, with a view to providing the information in an appropriate timely manner.
• Monitoring and enforcing compliance – ASX will make a number of changes including exploring improvements to its processes for monitoring its listing rules (false market) and providing increased transparency to the market about its monitoring of long-term suspended entities. It will also change its processes for reviewing prospectuses, including by formulating more extensive procedures to guide the timing and extent of its reviews, and taking a broader approach to reviewing the information in prospectuses and improving its record keeping.

Click on the above link for more details.