REITs

ASIC has released final guidance for two key components of the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms - namely the Best Interests Duty and Scaled Advice guides. The introduction of these guides is intended to ensure retail clients receive reliable advice about financial products. The guides apply to service providers and aim to protect retail clients against conflicted or poor quality personal advice. The reforms will be mandatory from 1 July 2013 which means that all advisers will have to act in their clients’ best interests when providing advice and no adviser can put their own interests ahead of their clients' interests.

On 23 February 2013, six key EMIR regulatory technical standards were published in the Official Journal. The technical standards will enter into force on 15 March 2013 and this will be a very significant date for users of OTC derivatives.

This alert provides further information on the Derivatives Bill, which is a draft legislation recently introduced by the Australian Government to meet its G20 obligations on derivatives regulations.