By
The Customer Owned Banking Association (COBA) have cautiously welcomed new efforts to streamline financial regulation, saying the government’s latest reforms could finally bring relief from years of overlapping compliance requirements.
Introduced by Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services Daniel Mulino, the updated Regulatory Initiatives Grid (RIG) introduces new measures to better align reform timelines and improve coordination among financial regulators.
COBA chief executive Michael Lawrence (pictured above) said the changes acknowledge how complex regulation has disproportionately affected customer-owned banks over the past decade.
“Greater coordination among regulators will reduce duplication and ease compliance pressures for smaller banks, ultimately creating a more dynamic and diverse banking landscape for Australian consumers,” Lawrence said.
The association has argued that the rapid build-up of new prudential, capital, and reporting rules over the past decade has stretched smaller institutions to their limits. The Council of Financial Regulators raised similar concerns last year, noting that regulatory workloads had grown faster than the sector’s capacity to adapt.
Lawrence said aligning reform timelines will help customer-owned banks plan and allocate resources more efficiently: “The volume and overlap of recent regulation have had a magnified impact on smaller financial institutions. Better coordination will ensure major reforms are properly spaced out.”
While the government will continue to publish the RIG twice a year to improve transparency, COBA said it hopes the new framework signals a more measured approach to regulatory change.
