Super cold calling ban: buying leads is about to come with a paper trail

About 12,000 Australians lost more than $1 billion when the Shield Master Fund and First Guardian Master Fund collapsed, and for many of them the loss began with a phone call they never asked for.

Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino used the National Press Club on Wednesday to announce a superannuation cold calling ban. The package also includes a licensing requirement for lead generators and a tougher anti-hawking regime.

“These reforms are designed to disrupt some of the most damaging business models operating in the system today,” Mulino said.

The package follows Treasury’s Curbing lead generation activity consultation, which closed to submissions on 22 May 2026. It also follows ASIC’s review of advice licensees using lead generation services, announced in February.

Two elements matter more to practising advisers than the superannuation cold calling ban that will carry most of the coverage.

Lead generation becomes a compliance risk

The first element places accountability on the licensee at the end of the chain. Treasury proposed that AFS licensees take reasonable steps to ensure any leads or referrals they obtain were sourced lawfully. The reasoning is that the licensee ultimately benefits from the consumer contact.

Catherine Evans, founder and head of legal at Kit Legal, advises licensees on lead generation and anti-hawking. She rates that obligation as the most consequential part of Wednesday’s announcement, and the part drawing the least attention.

“Most of the coverage will focus on the cold calling ban, but the more significant change for licensees is the lead generation obligation,” Evans says. “If you are buying leads, you now have to know how those leads were generated and be able to demonstrate it.”

That second half carries the weight. Knowing how a lead arrived is one thing, producing the records that prove it is another. Few licensees buying leads through third-party aggregators can trace a phone number back to the advertisement or the call that produced it.

“A number of firms have treated lead generation as a marketing spend rather than a compliance risk, and that position is no longer sustainable.”

The exemption holding the model together

The second element reaches the structure of the anti-hawking regime. The government will strengthen consent requirements and lift penalties for breaches. It will also limit the existing financial advice exemption to current client relationships.

The exemption currently allows unsolicited real-time contact where personal advice follows. That is what explains how a cold call about a superannuation balance can end with a signed switching recommendation.

“Limiting the advice exemption to existing client relationships is the change that will have the greatest practical effect,” Evans says. “That exemption is what many of these operators have been relying on, and once it is removed the business model becomes very difficult to run.”

Advisers building a practice through digital marketing and referral partners should read that change carefully rather than assume it targets somebody else.

A restriction drawn tightly around existing clients reaches every licensee who contacts a prospect in real time, whatever the quality of the advice that follows. Documentation of consent and lead provenance now becomes part of ordinary practice management.

Why the harm compounds after 55

Drew Meredith, director at Wattle Partners in Melbourne, meets the consequences at the client end. He describes an approach built to sound like a favour, delivered by someone who has done the preparation the listener has not.

“If you are 58 years old and you have not thought a great deal about your superannuation, it is difficult to distinguish that call from legitimate advice,” Meredith says.

The harm compounds by age, and Meredith argues advisers understand this better than the headline loss figures suggest.

“What people tend to underestimate is the timing. If you lose a portion of your superannuation at 35 you have decades of working life in which to recover it, whereas at 60 you do not have that option. That is the part of this that cannot be repaired, and it is why the harm runs deeper than the dollar figure suggests.”

Average losses across the Shield and First Guardian collapses ran to roughly $100,000 a person. Many of those investors were within a decade of retirement.

Who funds the failures

Disrupting a business model produces failures, and failures produce claims. The Compensation Scheme of Last Resort revised its FY2027 levy estimate to $198.1 million in July. Of that, $190.3 million falls on the personal financial advice sub-sector against a $20 million cap, which has forced the scheme to seek a special levy. Expected claims rose to 1,567 from 912.

Evans wants that side of the ledger addressed alongside the conduct rules.

“None of this can be looked at in isolation from the Compensation Scheme of Last Resort, which needs a genuine review. At the moment the firms doing the right thing are picking up the tab for the firms that are not, and that is not a sustainable way to fund consumer protection,” she says.

“If the Government intends to disrupt these business models, it has to deal with how the resulting failures are paid for at the same time.”

Where the education has moved

Rules change conduct at the margin, and Meredith argues the calls work because of something the rules leave untouched.

“Banning the conduct only addresses half of the problem. These calls succeed because so many people have never had superannuation explained to them in plain language,” he says.

“That is beginning to change, although not through the channels the industry tends to expect, because people are now learning from YouTube and podcasts rather than from brochures and product disclosure statements. If we want fewer Australians falling for this, that is where the effort needs to go.”

Treasury can close the exemption and licence the callers. Explaining a superannuation balance to a 58-year-old who has never had the conversation remains work for advisers. The practices doing it in public are the ones those calls will struggle to get past.