Guides · 7 chapters

The Financial Services Guide

Last reviewed 29 August 2026

This guide works through the regulatory architecture that sits around any business touching financial products in Australia: whether you need an Australian Financial Services Licence, whether you can operate under someone else's, what ASIC expects of you once licensed, how you are permitted to talk about your product in market, and what a compliance function actually has to do to survive a surveillance. It is written for founders, executives and responsible managers rather than for compliance specialists.

Chapters

1. 01Do you need an AFSL?The licensing trigger — financial products, financial services, and the exemptions that are relied on more often than they apply.
2. 02Authorisation pathways: your own licence or someone else'sComparing a full AFSL application with authorised representative and corporate authorised representative arrangements, including what each costs you in control.
3. 03ASIC obligations once you are licensedThe general obligations in section 912A, the licence conditions, and the reporting and lodgement cycle that follows you every year.
4. 04Disclosure: FSGs, SOAs, PDSs and target market determinationsWhich disclosure document applies to which activity, when it must be given, and where disclosure obligations are most often missed.
5. 05Marketing and promotion of financial productsAdvertising rules, the general advice warning, hidden advice risk in marketing copy, influencers and finfluencer exposure, and misleading conduct.
6. 06Building a compliance framework that holds upGovernance, responsible managers, monitoring and supervision, registers, training, outsourcing and the records that make compliance provable.
7. 07Breach reporting, remediation and enforcementThe reportable situations regime, how to run an incident, client remediation, and what to expect from ASIC surveillance and enforcement.

Related reading

• What is an AFSL?
• What is ASIC and what does it regulate?
• Advice and compliance — service page