The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) is consulting on the hawking provisions.
Public comment will be open until the 17 August to provide feedback.
The changes focus on the recommendations form the royal commission into financial services to reform hawking the provisions to protect consumers.
ASIC Commissioner Danielle Press said in an official statement, “These reforms strengthen and consolidate the three existing hawking prohibitions into a single prohibition covering all financial products. The reforms take a technology neutral approach, meaning the ban applies to all forms of real-time communication. The prohibition incorporates for the first time a definition of unsolicited contact, requiring that consent given by a consumer be positive, voluntary and clear”.
ASIC identified what they saw as some Key features of the reforms:
application to all financial products (as defined in the Corporations Act 2001)
a definition of ‘unsolicited contact’ that extends the prohibition from in-person meetings and telephone calls, to any ‘real-time interaction in the nature of a conversation or discussion’ without consumer consent
that consumer consent must be positive, voluntary, clear, and capable of being reasonably understood
that consent only be valid for six weeks from the date it is given and may be withdrawn by the consumer at any time, and
a statutory right of return for consumers who have been hawked a product.
