The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has launched a public internal dispute resolution (IDR) data dashboard that allows users to compare complaint volumes and outcomes across individual financial firms, including insurers. The tool brings together data on complaints involving home loans, credit cards, life and general insurance, and financial advice, and shows how those matters progress through firms’ IDR processes.
ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said the new resource is intended to provide greater visibility of how firms respond when complaints are raised. “Transparency is crucial to supporting a fair, strong, and efficient financial system. The launch of our new internal dispute resolution data dashboard marks a significant step in improving public scrutiny of the system,” he said.
The dashboard aggregates IDR reports lodged by financial firms and presents them by institution and product type. Users can view complaints by reporting period, issue type, and outcome, as well as the time firms take to resolve matters and the monetary remedies paid. The data can serve as an external reference point on claims and complaints handling, including timeliness, dispute themes, and resolution pathways. It also enables monitoring of complaint patterns linked to specific products, such as home insurance, motor policies, consumer credit insurance, or life cover.
Kirkland said the dashboard has been designed to assist both consumers and regulators. “Beyond providing for a comparison between individual firms, this dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of how the Australian financial sector handles complaints. This makes it easier to identify key trends, including the reasons complaints are lodged, increases or decreases in complaints handling times, and the sorts of products that attract the most complaints. This in turn allows us to flag emerging issues for industry attention before they become serious problems,” he said.
The dashboard includes information for users on navigation and data interpretation, as well as definitions and an outline of the methodology used. ASIC has aligned the IDR dataset with the Australian Financial Complaints Authority’s (AFCA) external dispute resolution reporting so the datasets can be considered together across the dispute lifecycle. The new publication follows ASIC’s Reportable Situations dashboard, launched in October, which publishes information on licensees’ self-reported breaches.
Under the IDR framework, certain financial firms, including insurers, are required to report all complaints received through their internal processes. Legislation allows ASIC to publish this firm-level information. ASIC previously used thematic publications to outline IDR trends across the market. Following consultation with industry and other stakeholders, it moved to more granular, comparative reporting.
The regulator consulted on its proposed approach in April and May 2025 and released a feedback summary in September 2025 outlining the final model for IDR data publication. The approach was finalised after ASIC reviewed 47 submissions to Consultation Paper 383 on reportable situations and IDR data publication. The new dashboard adds a public data source that can be used to compare internal performance with peers, AFCA statistics, and internal risk indicators, particularly in relation to claims handling, product design, and distribution practices.
ASIC’s expanded IDR reporting is being introduced at a time of rising external disputes. AFCA reported 111,373 complaints in the 2025 calendar year, an increase of 14% on 2024. Consumers and small businesses received $643 million in compensation and refunds through AFCA over the same period, up 120% year on year. The increase in complaints was spread across banking and finance, insurance, investments and advice, and superannuation. AFCA identified large-scale failures in the financial advice sector as a major driver of the rise in investment and advice disputes, which grew 58%.
Complaints from self-managed superannuation funds increased 59%, including 2,162 complaints linked to the collapse of the Shield and First Guardian Master Funds. Superannuation complaints increased 29% to 7,687 in 2025, largely due to delays in processing claims and disputes over claim decisions. While death benefit complaints remained steady, AFCA pointed to timing and transparency in claim handling as continuing areas of concern. Since starting operations, AFCA has received more than 634,000 complaints and helped secure $2.1 billion in compensation.
