ASIC Compliance Requirements Every Insurance Broker Should Know in 2026

ASIC opened 2026 by telling the market exactly where it intends to focus its resources, and insurance featured heavily in that message. Claims and complaint handling failures by insurers are now a named enforcement priority, sitting alongside misleading pricing practices that affect the cost of living. Neither of these priorities is new to the industry's radar, but naming them explicitly signals where investigative attention and enforcement action are heading in the year ahead.

What has changed is the pace and visibility of ASIC's activity. What has not changed is the underlying obligation: AFS licensees, including many brokerages holding their own licence, still need to run financial services efficiently, honestly and fairly under the Corporations Act.

That obligation sits alongside a licence holder's AFSL obligations more broadly. Taken together, this year's priorities suggest ASIC is placing more weight on whether firms can demonstrate that standard in practice, not just describe it in a policy document.

Insurance brokers sit inside a specific slice of ASIC's 2026 priorities, and it is worth separating what applies directly from what applies more broadly across financial services. Three areas carry the most direct relevance for brokerages. The first is claims and complaint handling. ASIC has said plainly that with premiums rising and claims increasing, it will keep its focus on how insurers and the intermediaries around them handle customer complaints and claims. For brokers, this touches every stage of a client relationship where a claim or complaint could arise, not just the point of sale. The second is pricing and disclosure. Misleading pricing practices are one of ASIC's new enforcement priorities for 2026, and while the primary targets are large insurers and product issuers, brokers who communicate pricing, discounts or product comparisons to clients are inside the same conversation.

The third is protection of vulnerable consumers, which remains one of ASIC's regulatory guide touchstones and one of its enduring enforcement priorities year on year. This one has not changed in 2026, and it is easy to underweight precisely because it is not new.

None of these are new obligations. They are existing general obligations under the Corporations Act, viewed through this year's enforcement lens. What ASIC is really asking is whether a brokerage's compliance measures are documented, implemented and actively monitored, or whether they exist mostly on paper.

For many brokerages, the compliance framework itself is not the issue. Policies exist, obligations are understood, and Responsible Managers, along with a compliance officer where the brokerage has one, know what the general obligations require. The gap tends to show up one layer down, in the evidence that those measures are actually operating day to day.

A brokerage that would hold up well against ASIC's 2026 priorities has a few things in common. Claims and complaints have a clear, consistently followed handling process, and that consistency is visible in call and file records, not just in the policy document describing the process. Pricing conversations are reviewable: if a client disputes what they were told about a premium or a product comparison, the brokerage can produce the actual conversation rather than relying on a broker's recollection. Breach identification happens close to real time rather than at the next scheduled file review, which shortens the window between an issue occurring and a brokerage becoming aware of it. And vulnerable customer handling is demonstrable in the same way: not just a policy that says vulnerable clients are treated with extra care, but records that show it happening. Underlying all of this is ASIC's regulatory guide framing: measures need to be documented, implemented, monitored and reviewed. Documentation on its own has never been enough, and this year's enforcement priorities suggest monitoring and evidence carry particular weight in 2026.

ASIC's 2026 priorities do not introduce new obligations for insurance brokers so much as sharpen the lens on existing ones. Claims and complaint handling, pricing and disclosure, and vulnerable customer protection all sit within the general obligations brokerages have carried for years. What has changed is the expectation that a brokerage can demonstrate those obligations are being met consistently, not just describe them in a policy document. Call monitoring is one of the more direct ways to close that gap, and it is where Callyx.ai is built to help.