Regulatory Priorities Across Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand
Ben Parker
•
Chief Executive Officer & Founder
September 10, 2026
In second blog exploring APAC's regulatory landscape, we discuss the areas regulators and focusing on in 2026 and beyond.
In the first blog of this series, we found market abuse regimes to be broadly aligned across the region. We did, however, identify some important nuances in local legal tests and supervisory structures, which can change how alerts are interpreted and investigated.
We pick up here where we left off there: beyond the rules themselves, what are regulators in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand focused on in 2026 and beyond?
Insider trading is the clearest point of convergence across the region. Three of the four regulators are looking more closely at where it is most likely to occur, how information moves between parties, and how that information might be used to gain an unfair advantage.
In Australia, insider trading remains an enduring enforcement priority. ASIC continues to monitor “anomalous trading ahead of price-sensitive announcements” – a long-running measure of market cleanliness, where unusual price movements or account behaviour can signal information leakage or insider trading.
Alongside that surveillance, ASIC is firming up its guidance on pre-hedging, where trading ahead of an anticipated client transaction can heighten insider trading and market manipulation risk. The regulator recognises pre-hedging as legitimate where it serves a genuine risk-management purpose and is intended to benefit the client, but expects strong controls around confidential information, conflicts, disclosure and consent, supervision, surveillance and record-keeping.
Firms should be able to evidence why the pre-hedging was undertaken, how market impact was managed and whether the activity remained consistent with the client’s interests and agreed execution terms.
Hong Kong shows a similar event-led approach, although the SFC’s “front-loaded” strategy is broader than just insider dealing. The regulator is conducting daily reviews of listed-company announcements and disclosures to identify red flags and potential corporate misconduct, alongside 62 new listed-company enquiries and 223 new misconduct investigations.
As we noted in the first blog, the Securities and Futures Commission’s (SFC) insider dealing framework places particular weight on who had the information, how it was passed on and what the recipient knew about its source and significance.
“Operation Fuse” shows that investigative rigour in practice. The SFC and ICAC investigated suspected insider dealing and corruption spanning two securities firms, a hedge fund manager and a middleman, with allegations that confidential information on upcoming share placements was passed in return for bribes. It is a clear example of both collaborative enforcement and the complexity of the networks regulators are trying to reconstruct. A trade is only one part of the picture; the people, relationships, incentives and information flows matter most.
The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) has made clear its intention to “work closely with NZ RegCo… to detect and address insider conduct”, prioritising referrals involving senior managers and directors — a group in which it says it continues to see persistent instances of potential misconduct. It is the clearest example across the region of a regulator calling out specific roles, leaving little ambiguity over who is under the microscope.
The FMA has also clarified that relevant information in insider trading cases does not always have to relate directly to the issuer being traded. “Shadow trading”, as it is commonly referred to, is a risk we first called out in our 2025 Global Trends in Market Abuse report after the SEC brought its first-ever charge. Since then, few regulators have been vocal on the issue.
That changed with the FMA’s Information Sheet at the end of 2025, which explains how insider trading prohibitions may apply where a person trades in issuer B while possessing non-public information relating to issuer A. The regulator points to factors including the relationship between the issuers, sector concentration, price correlation, timing, changes in trading strategy and whether the stated rationale is consistent with the surrounding facts.
Regulators are looking more closely at the events, relationships and information flows around a trade. For firms, that means insider surveillance needs to help reconstruct the information chain well enough to explain, and ideally prove, why the activity is suspicious.
Elsewhere, the underlying market-integrity objectives are similar, but regulators are applying pressure differently. One theme runs through much of the commentary, though: regulators are investing in stronger surveillance and detection capabilities, and firms are expected to do the same.
Australia: upgrading surveillance capability + raising gatekeeper expectations
Singapore: more disclosure-led supervision + surveillance as the backstop
Hong Kong: named typologies + stronger intelligence sharing + earlier detection
New Zealand: mature surveillance-and-referral model + targeted investigative follow-up
ASIC says its real-time and post-trade surveillance already targets insider trading, manipulation, continuous disclosure breaches, disorderly trading and misinformed markets, but it is now “developing new tools to increase our detection of complex and novel market misconduct matters, market microstructure manipulation and breaches of the market integrity rules.”
That comes against a more automated market backdrop. ASIC has highlighted the implications of “agentic AI and machine-speed, autonomous trading” entering the hands of traders, participants and market operators. These technologies don’t automatically create abuse, but they raise the speed and complexity of the behaviour surveillance needs to interpret.
For market “gatekeepers”, ASIC has recently emphasised the need for layered controls: pre-trade filters, real-time and post-trade reviews, supervision of direct market access, and prompt escalation of suspicious activity. These are helpful call-outs for firms, who now have specific areas against which to test their surveillance framework.
During periods of volatility, ASIC has also told firms to report suspicious activity when it is identified, not after the investigation is complete.
SGX RegCo has shifted towards a more disclosure-based, market-driven regime designed to improve efficiency and reduce unnecessary regulatory friction. But it is explicit that surveillance is not being relaxed: continuous monitoring for unusual trading “remains unchanged”, and the supervisor says it will continue to intervene in cases of serious irregularity and manipulation.
A disclosure-led regime gives firms more room to operate, but also increases the importance of timely disclosure, internal controls and being able to explain unusual activity when SGX RegCo comes knocking.
MAS, like ASIC, is also signalling a broader push towards technology-enabled detection. Its 2026 AI initiative is focused on AI-enabled detection that combines richer data and analytics to identify risk more effectively. It’s focused on financial crime rather than market abuse, but it shows a regulator already backing AI and richer analytics to improve detection in adjacent risk domains. Given SGX RegCo’s established surveillance of unusual trading, it is a useful signal of the direction Singapore’s wider supervisory toolkit is moving.
Hong Kong’s SFC is relatively explicit about the forms of misconduct it is seeing. One live example is ramp-and-dump activity facilitated through social media and messaging apps, including scammers impersonating well-known stock commentators to draw investors into manipulated stocks.
The SFC has warned about social-media-enabled ramp-and-dump schemes for several years, but it remains firmly on the radar in 2026. For firms, the practical challenge is whether trade surveillance can be joined with communications signals well enough to reconstruct a social-media-led manipulation pattern – an integration problem many firms are still working through.
Beyond that, the SFC is another regulator focused on strengthening its surveillance technology. Like ASIC, it is explicit about that direction. In its 2025–26 Annual Report, strategic priority one includes “expanding surveillance and investigatory toolkit” to enable “earlier detection of market abuse”.
At the same time, it is placing heavy emphasis on collaboration: locally with law-enforcement agencies, cross-border with the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and internationally through intelligence sharing and investigatory assistance.
The FMA says market cleanliness remains broadly stable, with slight improvement since 2020. In 2025, around one in 11 market-moving announcements saw unusual price activity beforehand, though not necessarily misconduct.
Over that period, NZ RegCo says its surveillance team conducted 101 investigations into potential market abuse and disclosure breaches in 2025 and triaged more than 20,000 trade alerts. 40 matters were referred to the FMA, including 29 relating to potential insider trading and eight to potential manipulation.
NZ RegCo is also unusually transparent about the detail behind that surveillance, including typologies such as marking the close, multiparty collusion, pump-and-dump and layering. Investigations can draw on beneficial ownership, order records, voice recordings, electronic communications and end-client information.
The emphasis is more on sharpening an already active surveillance-and-referral model around those named risks.
Market abuse supervision across APAC is becoming more joined-up and more demanding. Regulators are getting better at connecting data, information flows and counterparties, and at working across agencies and borders.
Surveillance teams are increasingly being judged against the same standard. Where regulators spell out typologies, control expectations or escalation requirements, firms should treat those as practical indicators of where the next challenge is likely to come from.
In the final blog, we move from supervisory signals to enforcement, looking at cases from 2024 through H2 2026 to see how those expectations are playing out in practice.
