Most of the big insurers and financial services companies have obtained their Australian financial services licences (AFSL), but about 5000 of the expected 8000 applications – mostly from intermediaries – have yet to be lodged.

Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) Director of Licensing & Business Operations Pauline Vamos says that although the licensing queue is rapidly growing, insurance brokers, super trustees and financial planners are still “lagging behind”.

“We’re not seeing enough from that end of town but we’re not particularly worried because we expect most to come through before December 10,” she said. “We are at our peak time now so I’d urge anyone who hasn’t pushed the licensing button to hurry up.”

Last month ASIC hired 15 supplementary staff to cope with the possibility of an AFSL logjam, and will hire another 15 at the beginning of February to cope with transitional issues. To date it has issued about 1500 licences.

Ms Vamos says about 20% of the applications have been of “terrible quality”, and it’s the newest  industry players that are having the most trouble with compliance issues.

“A lot of people still aren’t reading the guides properly,” she said. “We’re still getting a lot of sales documents rather than actual applications, and all it takes is for them to put in the hard work now and read the guides to save a lot of correction time in the future.”