Australia ASIC Enforcement Action Tracker

ASIC enforces across the widest surface of any APAC conduct regulator: banning orders, civil-penalty judgments, infringement notices, Federal Court actions, AFS and credit-licence cancellations, Markets Disciplinary Panel outcomes, director disqualifications, and CDPP criminal referrals — all announced as numbered media releases on asic.gov.au. This Actor normalizes those releases into per-action JSON with firm and individual names separated, the AUD penalty parsed, the regulatory basis tagged, and filters for action type, date, firm, and person. It is purpose-built for Australian AFS / credit licensees and AUSTRAC reporting entities.

Pay-per-event: you are charged $0.20 per ASIC enforcement action returned (plus the $0.00005 actor-start event). A run that matches nothing returns 0 rows and no per-action charge; a run that cannot reach asic.gov.au fails with a status message rather than returning stale rows. Open an Apify account to run it.

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Related Actors — APAC Enforcement Cluster

For cross-jurisdiction financial-services enforcement monitoring, pair this ASIC tracker with its NexGenData siblings:

• Singapore MAS Enforcement — Monetary Authority of Singapore enforcement actions
• Hong Kong SFC Enforcement Tracker — Securities and Futures Commission disciplinary actions
• FINMA + MAS + SFC Combined Enforcement Tracker — cross-border CH↔SG↔HK enforcement sweep

Why ASIC enforcement data matters in Australia

The Australian Securities & Investments Commission is the country's integrated corporate, markets, financial-services and consumer-credit regulator. Created in 1998 under the ASIC Act 2001, it administers the Corporations Act 2001, the National Consumer Credit Protection Act 2009 (NCCP), the Insurance Contracts Act 1984, the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) Act 1993 (jointly with APRA), and the AML/CTF Act 2006 (jointly with AUSTRAC). It supervises roughly 6,500 AFS licensees, 4,700 Australian Credit Licensees, 2,100 registered managed-investment schemes, and every public company and registered scheme in the country.

ASIC publishes enforcement outcomes across several distinct statutory and disciplinary pathways, each one giving rise to a public media release:

• Banning orders under Corporations Act s.920A (financial-services) and NCCP Act s.80 (credit-activities). Bans run for a defined period or permanently. Once published they are recorded on the Banned and Disqualified Register, which is the single source of truth for fit-and-proper screening of advisers, brokers, mortgage originators, and AFS responsible managers.
• Civil penalties imposed by the Federal Court on application by ASIC. Maximum civil-penalty units rose substantially with the 2019 reforms — currently the larger of $1.565m, three times the benefit derived, or 10% of annual turnover capped at 2.5m penalty units for body corporates per contravention. The court-ordered penalties for greenwashing, breach reporting, market integrity, and design and distribution obligations are now publication-grade headline numbers.
• Infringement notices issued by ASIC itself under ASIC Act s.12GX, NCCP s.288, or specific market-integrity rules. Penalty amounts are calibrated to the size of the entity but are issued without admission of liability. ASIC has become a heavy user of infringement notices for greenwashing, misleading advertising, and DDO breaches — fast, public, and statutorily protected from defamation claims.
• Federal Court actions beyond civil penalties — declarations, injunctions, disgorgement orders, redress directions to AFS licensees, and unfair-contract-term declarations under the strengthened 2023 regime.
• AFS and Australian Credit Licence cancellations or suspensions under Corporations Act s.915C and NCCP Act s.54. May be voluntary (firm exits the business) or compulsory.
• Markets Disciplinary Panel (MDP) outcomes — the MDP is the statutory body that handles alleged breaches of ASIC Market Integrity Rules by market participants (ASX, Cboe, ASX 24 etc.). Findings are published with case identifier and penalty.
• Director disqualifications under Corporations Act s.206F (administrative ASIC disqualifications up to 5 years) and s.206C/D (court-ordered disqualifications up to life). ASIC's phoenix activity programme drives much of this work.
• Criminal referrals to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP). ASIC's investigators do not prosecute directly; the CDPP brings charges under the Corporations Act, the ASIC Act, or the Criminal Code on referral.

For anyone running Australian financial-services or credit-licensee compliance, that disclosure stream is the single most important regulatory feed in the country — and there is no clean machine-readable export. ASIC publishes media releases as server-rendered HTML pages under /about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/, the newsroom index is paginated and JavaScript-rendered, and the regulator's Banned and Disqualified Register requires per-name searches against a JSF/PrimeFaces UI that fights automation. Most compliance teams either pay $25,000+/year for Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence (which bundles ASIC data with material they don't need), or they pay a paralegal to copy-paste from asic.gov.au into Excel every Monday morning.

This actor solves that for the price of a coffee.

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What you get

Per enforcement action, the actor emits a single dataset row with:

Field	Description
action_id	ASIC media-release reference (e.g. 25-194MR) — links back to the canonical media-release URL
firm_name	Regulated entity named in the release (AFS / credit licensee or the company the conduct concerns), parsed from the release text — null when no company is named
individual_name	Named individual, taken from the headline and confirmed in the release body — null when no individual is named
action_type	BANNING / CIVIL_PENALTY / INFRINGEMENT / COURT_ACTION / LICENCE_CANCEL / CRIMINAL / MDP / DISQUALIFICATION
penalty_amount_aud	Numeric AUD penalty (null when sanction is non-monetary — banning, disqualification, licence cancellation, declaratory relief)
infringement_summary	ASIC's own summary of the action, as published on the media release
date_of_action	ISO YYYY-MM-DD of the date the ASIC action was issued or the court order was made
regulatory_basis	Acts and statutory sections cited in the release body (e.g. Corporations Act 2001 — s1043A) — null when the release cites none
full_release_url	Canonical asic.gov.au media-release URL
data_source	Provenance string
title	The media-release headline
published_at	Full ISO publication timestamp from ASIC's newsroom index

Each row is exactly enough to populate a compliance-tracking Airtable, Notion database, or Snowflake table without any post-processing. Cast penalty_amount_aud to numeric, parse date_of_action as date, and you have a queryable enforcement-history table for every Australian licensee and named individual in scope.

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Inputs

Field	Type	Purpose
action_type	enum	BANNING / CIVIL_PENALTY / INFRINGEMENT / COURT_ACTION / LICENCE_CANCEL / CRIMINAL / MDP / DISQUALIFICATION / ALL
date_from	ISO date	Lower bound on the date the action was issued
date_to	ISO date	Upper bound on the date the action was issued
firm_name	string	Case-insensitive substring match against firm name and summary text
individual_name	string	Case-insensitive substring match against named individual and summary text
max_results	int	Hard cap on actions returned (1-2000)

All inputs are optional. Run with {} to retrieve the most recent enforcement actions sorted by date_of_action descending. Run with action_type=BANNING and a 90-day window to monitor every recent ASIC ban. Run with firm_name="Macquarie" to surface every recent ASIC action touching the Macquarie group. Run with individual_name="Smith" against your hiring pipeline for fit-and-proper screening.

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Sample input and output

Input:

{
  "action_type": "ALL",
  "date_from": "2024-01-01",
  "date_to": "2025-12-31",
  "firm_name": "",
  "individual_name": "",
  "max_results": 50
}

Output (one row per ASIC enforcement action):

{
  "action_id": "26-207MR",
  "firm_name": "Beacon Minerals Limited",
  "individual_name": "Alexander McCulloch",
  "action_type": "CRIMINAL",
  "penalty_amount_aud": null,
  "infringement_summary": "Alexander John McCulloch, a former project manager at Beacon Minerals Limited (Beacon Minerals), has been convicted and sentenced to 12 months' imprisonment for insider trading, to be released forthwith on a recognisance of $5,000 and to be of good behaviour for 2 years.",
  "date_of_action": "2026-09-03",
  "regulatory_basis": "Corporations Act 2001 \u2014 s1043A",
  "full_release_url": "https://www.asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/2026-releases/26-207mr-former-beacon-minerals-project-manager-alexander-mcculloch-sentenced-for-insider-trading",
  "data_source": "asic.gov.au newsroom media-release index (live)",
  "title": "Former Beacon Minerals project manager Alexander McCulloch sentenced for insider trading",
  "published_at": "2026-09-03T10:30:00Z"
}

Pricing

Pay-per-event — you pay only for the ASIC enforcement actions the actor actually returns. No subscription, no minimum, no per-minute compute charges.

Event	Price (USD)
Actor start	$0.00005
Per ASIC enforcement action returned	$0.20

A typical 90-day all-types sweep returns ~12-20 actions and costs $2.40-$4.00. A targeted query (every banning order in the last 12 months) returns ~8-15 records and costs $1.60-$3.00. A run that matches nothing returns 0 rows and is charged no per-action fee.

For comparison: Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence with ASIC coverage starts at A$25,000/seat/year. LexisNexis Practical Guidance — Financial Services lists at A$18,000/firm/year. Wolters Kluwer CCH iKnow with ASIC enforcement add-on starts at A$15,000/firm/year. This actor lets a 30-person Australian compliance team get the same ASIC enforcement data for less than the cost of a single billable hour from external counsel.

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How it works

ASIC's newsroom publishes its media-release index as public JSON (download.asic.gov.au/asic-nga/data/newsroom/newsroom-mr-latest.json and …/newsroom-mr-archive.json), and every release is a server-rendered page under asic.gov.au/about-asic/news-centre/find-a-media-release/. The actor:

1. Reads the live newsroom index (latest + archive), retrying and escalating to a residential proxy if ASIC returns a block. If the index still cannot be read, the run fails with a status message naming the cause — it never falls back to stale rows.
2. Keeps the releases ASIC tags as enforcement whose headline resolves to a recognisable action type (this excludes corporate-plan and policy releases, which ASIC also tags enforcement).
3. Applies your action-type, date-window, firm-name and individual-name filters.
4. Fetches the canonical media-release page for each match and parses the penalty amount, the statutory basis, the firm and the named individual out of the release text.
5. Pushes each action to the dataset, billed at $0.20/action. If nothing matches, the run succeeds with 0 rows and a status message explaining why — and no per-action charge.

The actor honours the run time limit: it stops cleanly and says so in the status message rather than being killed mid-page.

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Use cases

AFS licensee compliance officers and responsible managers

Run a weekly cron task against action_type=ALL with a rolling 7-day window. Every Monday at 09:00 AEST you receive the previous week's complete enforcement feed. Cross-reference each new firm_name against your counterparty list, your introducer / authorised-representative network, your platform-relationship counterparties, and your panel of fund managers. Each match becomes an immediate compliance ticket. ASIC imposed over A$176m in civil penalties in 2024, a record year, and the trajectory continues upward — missing one of these against a counterparty is no longer a low-stakes oversight under the strengthened ASIC s.912DAA breach-reporting regime.

MLROs and AML / financial-crime teams under AUSTRAC

For AUSTRAC reporting entities — banks, remitters, casinos, digital-currency-exchange providers, and the newly-added Tranche-2 entities (lawyers, accountants, real-estate agents, conveyancers) under the 2026 reforms — ASIC enforcement actions provide critical adverse-media context for periodic and trigger reviews. A banning order against a director is a clear AML risk indicator. A civil penalty for misleading conduct or unconscionable conduct affects the entity's risk rating in your enterprise risk-and-compliance system. Wire the actor's output into your KYC/CDD platform (Actimize, Quantexa, NICE, ComplyAdvantage, Sumsub) as an adverse-media feed.

KYC and fit-and-proper screening for AFS-licensed advice firms

Before onboarding a new financial adviser, mortgage broker, or insurance broker, run the actor with the individual's name in the individual_name filter. If they appear on an ASIC banning order or as a subject of a Federal Court civil-penalty action, you have an immediate decline signal — escalate to a senior person under FASEA / ASIC Standard 2 (now Financial Adviser Standards) fit-and-proper assessment. For ongoing-suitability obligations under Corporations Act s.961B and the Code of Ethics, re-run the screen quarterly against your full adviser book.

Legal and company-secretary teams at ASX-listed entities

ASIC enforcement actions against your firm, your competitors, or your supply chain are continuous-disclosure-adjacent events under ASX Listing Rule 3.1. They are also material to your D&O insurance application, your prospectus due diligence, and your s.299A operating-and-financial-review disclosure. Run the actor against your ASX peer-group every quarter. Use the structured output to populate the board-paper enforcement-environment briefing. Use the regulatory_basis field to map enforcement trends against the parts of the Corporations Act that affect your own practices.

M&A and private-equity due-diligence practitioners

Acquiring an Australian AFS licensee, ACL holder, registered managed-investment scheme, or RSE-licensed superannuation trustee? The pre-deal due-diligence question "has ASIC taken any enforcement action against this entity, its subsidiaries, its responsible managers, or its directors in the last 5 years?" is normally answered by an Australian law-firm partner at A$1,000-$2,500 per hour. Run this actor with the entity name and a 5-year window, get the same data in 90 seconds, then hand the structured output to your legal counsel for confirmation. The cost-saving compounds for venture-portfolio-monitoring funds running quarterly surveillance across 50+ Australian portfolio companies.

Investigative and financial journalists

Australian Financial Review, The Australian, Capital Brief, Stockhead, Joe Aston's column, Justin Bailey, Adele Ferguson — the Australian financial-journalism community has carried the bulk of enforcement scrutiny historically. The actor lets you set up rolling 24-hour-window queries (date_from=yesterday) to detect new ASIC actions the moment they're published, automate a weekly market-integrity-rules monitor for trading-house breaches, or run a 12-month query for greenwashing infringement notices when writing on sustainable finance.

Academic researchers in conduct regulation and the Australian financial system

The empirical literature on ASIC enforcement — Comino, Carron, Sah, Walter — needs structured longitudinal data on banning frequencies, penalty quanta, and breach categories. The actor provides exactly that, queryable by date window and action type, in the schema typical of corporate-governance research. Cite the actor as the data source, run quarterly captures into Stata / R / Python for time-series analysis, and contribute to the public empirical record on Australian regulatory enforcement intensity.

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Comparison with alternatives

Solution	Per-action cost	Coverage	Update frequency	API access	Auth
This actor	$0.20/action	ASIC media releases, MDP, banning orders, civil penalties, court actions, licence cancels, criminal referrals	On-demand (run when you want)	REST / Apify Console / Python / Node SDK	None — public asic.gov.au data
asic.gov.au manual	Free	Same coverage	Manual copy/paste	None — paginated HTML only	None
Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence	A$25,000+/seat/year	ASIC + 900 global regulators	Daily	API on enterprise tier	Seat-based
LexisNexis Practical Guidance — Financial Services	A$18,000/firm/year	ASIC + practice notes	Weekly	None	Seat-based
Wolters Kluwer CCH iKnow	A$15,000/firm/year	ASIC + corporate practice	Daily	None	Seat-based
Mondaq / Lexology newsletter aggregation	Free (firm newsletters)	Partial — law firm marketing summaries	Weekly	None	Firm-by-firm

This actor is the only option that gives you structured, machine-readable ASIC enforcement data on a per-query basis with no subscription, no minimum spend, and no legal-publisher seat licensing.

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Related Apify actors from the NexGenData fleet

For complete APAC cross-border financial-services enforcement coverage, pair this actor with its NexGenData siblings:

• Singapore MAS Enforcement — Monetary Authority of Singapore enforcement: prohibition orders, civil penalties, AML composition penalties, licence revocations (SGD). Deep single-jurisdiction Singapore tracker.
• Hong Kong SFC Enforcement Tracker — Securities and Futures Commission disciplinary fines, prosecutions, cold-shoulder and disqualification orders, licence suspensions (HKD). Deepest Hong Kong enforcement record in the fleet.
• FINMA + MAS + SFC Combined Enforcement Tracker — one-call cross-border private-banking surveillance sweep across Switzerland, Singapore, and Hong Kong, normalized to a single feed with USD conversion.

Use these together for comprehensive APAC and cross-border financial-services enforcement monitoring.

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FAQ

Q: Does it cover banning orders and court actions? A: Yes — the full ASIC taxonomy: banning orders, civil-penalty judgments, infringement notices, Federal Court actions, licence cancellations, MDP outcomes, director disqualifications, and CDPP criminal referrals.

Q: Are penalty amounts in AUD? A: Yes — penalty_amount_aud carries the numeric AUD penalty (null for non-monetary sanctions such as bans or disqualifications).

Q: Can I filter by a specific firm? A: Yes — the firm_name filter does a case-insensitive substring match against firm name and summary text.

Q: Does it include greenwashing cases? A: Yes — recent ASIC greenwashing penalties and infringement notices are in scope.

Q: Is the data official ASIC content? A: Yes. Every row is built from a publicly accessible asic.gov.au media release and links back to it. The actor does not editorialise the source content.

Q: How recent is the data? A: Every run reads ASIC's live newsroom index, so the newest media release ASIC has published is the newest row you get.

Q: Does it cover joint ASIC-APRA or ASIC-AUSTRAC actions? A: Yes. The regulatory_basis field captures the joint statutory grounds where multiple regulators co-act (typical for prudential-conduct or AML-financial-services overlap). The Cbus Super example is one such joint matter.

Q: Does it cover the Banned and Disqualified Register beyond banning orders? A: Yes. The BANNING and DISQUALIFICATION action types together cover Corporations Act s.920A bans, NCCP s.80 bans, Companies Auditors Disciplinary Board orders, and Corporations Act s.206F administrative director disqualifications.

Q: How do I export the data to Snowflake / BigQuery / Postgres? A: Apify's "Export dataset" feature outputs JSON / CSV / Excel / XML / RSS, plus push-to-S3 / GCS / Azure Blob, plus Apify integration with Make / Zapier / n8n / Pipedream / Airbyte / Fivetran. Wire it into the warehouse of your choice. Pricing is per Apify pay-per-event, billed transparently.

Q: What's the latency from an ASIC release to it appearing in this actor? A: The actor reads ASIC's live newsroom index at run time, so a release is available as soon as ASIC publishes it — there is no cached or curated copy in between.

Q: How does this interact with the new ASIC modernised-licensing scheme? A: ASIC's Reportable Situations regime under Corporations Act s.912DAA generates a separate breach-reporting stream that is not publicly visible. This actor focuses on the public enforcement-outcome stream (media releases, court orders, infringement-notice publications, licence-cancellation gazette notices) rather than the firm-to-ASIC notification stream.

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Getting started

1. Create an Apify account — use your work email.
2. Open the actor page and click Run.
3. Configure inputs: leave defaults for a recent-actions sweep, or set action_type=BANNING and date_from=2025-01-01 for a 14-month banning-order monitor.
4. Run the actor. Results appear in the dataset tab; export to CSV / JSON / Excel / RSS / push to your warehouse.
5. Wire it into your weekly compliance dashboard via the Apify API or Apify scheduling.

For volume customers (>10,000 actions/month), contact NexGenData via the Apify creator page for committed-volume pricing.

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