FinTech Australia has stood up a dedicated Wealthtech Policy Working Group (WPWG) as the industry body tries to drag policy engagement earlier into the regulatory cycle, the move landing the same week the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's consumer commissioner Alan Kirkland publicly warned Gen Z investors against treating ChatGPT and social media feeds as financial advisers.
The new working group, announced through industry trade IFA, is being framed by FinTech Australia as a member-led forum for raising emerging regulatory issues with government and the regulator before formal consultation processes have closed off scope. According to the body, wealth-technology firms now account for around 21% of Australia's fintech landscape, spread across nearly 200 businesses spanning digital advice, superannuation, investment platforms and personal finance.
FinTech Australia chief executive Rehan D'Almeida said the wealthtech segment was selected for early treatment because of the unusual number of regulatory regimes it sits across — financial advice, licensing, superannuation and data — and because the segment is most directly exposed to AI's deployment in front-of-customer workflows. He said the working group reflects a deliberate shift away from waiting for formal consultation papers and toward identifying friction earlier, while it can still be addressed in practical terms.
The group will be co-chaired by Samantha Horton and Jason Leong. Horton said fintech had played a clear role in expanding access to investment opportunities and advice while increasing competition. Leong said the regulatory environment for wealthtech remained unusually complex, sitting as it does at the intersection of advice, data and consumer-protection frameworks, and that the WPWG would focus on translating regulatory friction into practical feedback for policymakers.
The scope FinTech Australia has set for the group covers digital advice models, market infrastructure, disclosure settings, the interaction between wealth platforms and superannuation or managed-investment structures, data regulation, consumer frameworks and emerging risks tied to new technologies. The body says identifying unintended consequences of regulation is a core focus.
The launch coincides with a sharper public position from ASIC on the way Australians — particularly Gen Z — are sourcing financial information. Commissioner Alan Kirkland has highlighted that financial information lifted from social media or chatbots is regularly incomplete, and that reliance on it raises the chance of decisions consumers later regret.
Kirkland's specific warning was about how that risk compounds in volatile asset classes. "Short-term or speculative trading based on what's popular online carries real risks, particularly in volatile markets like crypto," he said.
The Kirkland warning is uncomfortable territory for an industry body that wants to expand digital advice, because it goes to a question regulators are increasingly asking out loud — at what point does an AI-generated recommendation become regulated personal advice. Many Australians, particularly younger investors, are already using free tools such as ChatGPT to get the equivalent of financial advice without the surrounding consumer-protection plumbing that licensed advisers operate within. ASIC's framing of that practice as a known and rising risk feeds straight into the policy debate the WPWG is positioning itself to enter.
For FinTech Australia, the timing is also a political signal. By launching a co-chaired wealthtech working group rather than a single-issue committee, the body is saying the regulatory pipeline is too dense for occasional written submissions to keep pace. The inaugural meeting is scheduled for 28 April and is expected to focus on regulatory developments, key challenges and priority areas — the boring-sounding agenda that, in practice, will set the tone of how AI in advice gets governed for the rest of the year.
The broader picture is one in which technology is integrating into the advice process faster than regulation is being written for it. AI is being deployed by licensed advisers to compress workflow, while at the same time being used directly by consumers as a substitute for that advice altogether. The Kirkland warning addresses the consumer side; the WPWG is the industry's attempt to address the regulatory side. The two are likely to meet in the middle on the question of where automation needs to carry licensing obligations and where it does not.
For practitioners watching the AFSL perimeter, the working group is not the headline. The headline is that the regulator and the industry body are now openly aligned on the diagnosis — that wealthtech is moving faster than the rule-set, that AI is the most exposed surface, and that Gen Z is the consumer cohort that will write the cost of getting the next 12 months wrong.