Think Tank Group and Bizcap AU Were Among 22 Companies That Paid ASIC $198,000 Each. The Alleged Failure Is a Lodgement Deadline, Not a Loan Book

1. What ASIC did on 4 November

The action is media release 26-268MR, and it is the latest instalment of a campaign rather than a one-off. ASIC says the notices went to 22 large proprietary companies for allegedly failing to lodge audited financial reports on time for the 2025 financial year. The specific reasons for ASIC’s concerns, the release says, are set out in the individual notices published on ASIC’s Infringement Notices Register — so the company-level detail is public, and it is a better source than anyone’s summary of it.

Two sentences in the release are easy to skip and both matter. The first is that payment is not an admission of guilt or liability. The second is that investigations continue for companies that have paid but still have outstanding reporting obligations. Paying the notice closes the notice. It does not necessarily close the file.

The scale of the surveillance is the part that should hold a broker’s attention. ASIC says it has received payment for 70 infringement notices since August 2025, totalling more than $13.7 million. In 2026 it contacted 234 companies; of those, 193 — 82 per cent — had allegedly failed to lodge FY2025 reports, and 147 lodged one or more outstanding reports after ASIC’s queries. The reasons companies gave were mundane: audit-related issues, administrative oversight, inadequate resources. Some said they were unaware of the obligation until ASIC made contact.

ASIC Commissioner Kate O’Rourke framed it as a market-information issue rather than a conduct one. “Timely financial reporting gives shareholders, creditors and others dealing with a company important information” about its financial position and performance, “helping them make informed decisions,” she said. On enforcement, she said ASIC’s actions over the past year send a clear message that “companies must meet their financial reporting obligations and should not assume that non-compliance will go undetected”, and that ASIC “will continue our data-focused surveillance into 2027 and will not hesitate to take further enforcement action”. On accountability she was blunt: “Directors are accountable for ensuring their company meets its financial reporting obligations.”

The run-up is instructive for anyone wondering whether this is a passing campaign. ASIC’s own 2026 releases include Canva Group paying $792,000, fashion and beauty retailers trading under the Zara, H&M and Sephora brands paying $596,000, Mainfreight Group paying $594,000, and Visy and Pratt companies paying more than $4.1 million. A 2025 release covered 12 large proprietary companies paying more than $2.2 million. Per-notice amounts have also moved with penalty unit indexation: Allens’ analysis of the campaign records earlier notices of at least $187,800 each, against $198,000 now.

2. Two names your panel will recognise

ASIC’s release names the companies but does not describe any company’s business, so identification is the reader’s job. Australian Broker, which picked up the finance angle, described Think Tank Group as a commercial and residential property finance business and Bizcap AU as a non-bank lender.

Both are checkable. Thinktank’s own commercial product guide carries a footer naming Think Tank Group Pty Ltd, Australian Credit Licence 333163, ABN 75 117 819 084. That is worth pausing on: the name on ASIC’s list matches the credit licensee on Thinktank’s own product guide, rather than a parent entity a few steps up the group. Bizcap’s website footer names Bizcap AU Pty Ltd, ACN 633 927 090, alongside a separate New Zealand entity. Bizcap’s site describes loans from $5,000 to $7.5 million and a line of credit to $750,000, says it works with brokers across Australia, and also lends direct. No credit licence number appears in its footer, which is consistent with a lender writing business-purpose facilities.

A third name on the list, Jolimont Development Finance Pty Ltd, reads like a finance entity. ASIC’s release does not say what it does and The Broker Times could not confirm whether it operates in the broker channel, so we are not counting it. Brokers who want to know which of the 22 touch their own pipeline should read the list on ASIC’s site rather than rely on a trade summary that stopped at the recognisable names.

Neither lender’s reasons are public. ASIC says they sit in the individual notices, and the trade reporting did not carry a response from either company. The honest position for a broker is therefore: a deadline was allegedly missed, a notice was paid, and that is the whole of what is known.

3. The obligation is a deadline, and the deadline is four months

This is general information rather than advice, and the instrument is the Corporations Act 2001 rather than anything in the credit regime. Part 2M.3 is the relevant chunk. Section 292 requires a reporting entity to prepare a financial report and a directors’ report for each financial year. Section 319 requires those reports, with the auditor’s report, to be lodged with ASIC — the lodgement form is Form 388, “Copy of financial statements and reports”. Sections 314 and 315 deal with giving the reports to members.

The clock is the part that generated 70 notices. ASIC’s release puts it at three months after financial year end for disclosing entities, registered schemes and registrable superannuation entities, and four months for other entities required to lodge. ASIC’s Form 388 page sets the same four-month window for all other entities required to lodge, and names large proprietary companies among those that must.

Who is caught is set by section 45A(3). A proprietary company is large if it satisfies at least two of three thresholds, measured together with the entities it controls: consolidated revenue of $50 million or more for the year; consolidated gross assets of $25 million or more at year end; or 100 or more employees at year end, with part-timers counted as an appropriate fraction of a full-time equivalent. Those figures have applied to financial years commencing on or after 1 July 2019, and ASIC’s RG 280 points to the AASB 2 notion of employees and others providing similar services as a starting point for the headcount.

There is also a personal dimension that principals of larger groups should understand properly rather than from a summary. Allens’ analysis of ASIC’s campaign notes that under section 344 a director who fails to take all reasonable steps to secure compliance with section 319 commits an offence, and that the court-imposed maximum for a section 319 contravention is $396,000 per contravention — a different and much larger number than the infringement notice amount. If that paragraph could apply to your group, it is a conversation with your own accountant and lawyer, not with a news article.

4. Why a non-bank’s lodged accounts matter to you at all

Here is the connection the headline version misses. For an ADI you place business with, there is a wall of public financial information: APRA statistics, prudential disclosures, a half-year result with a turnaround table in it. For a privately held non-bank, there is usually one public window, and it is the financial report lodged with ASIC under section 319. That report is what a broker, a referral partner or a trail buyer can actually read.

So the practical consequence of a late lodgement is not that something is wrong. It is that for a period, the window was shut. That is a different and much smaller statement, and it is the only one the facts support. It is also the one worth knowing, because the number of brokers who have ever pulled a funder’s lodged accounts is small, and the number who assume a non-bank’s financials are simply unavailable is large. They are available, for a fee, through an ASIC company search — and the lodgement history tells you whether and when they were filed, separately from what they say.

None of this is a reason to pull business off a lender. It is a reason to know where the information lives before you need it, which is usually the week a settlement date is at risk rather than the week a media release lands.

5. What RG 273 actually asks you about a credit provider

It is tempting to file this under best interests duty. It does not belong there, and saying so plainly is more useful than manufacturing an obligation.

RG 273 is specific about the credit-provider factors it has in mind. At RG 273.48(a), among the matters you are likely to need to consider are “the consumer’s priorities and preferences for different products or credit providers (including the price of the loan, product features such as bundled products or offset accounts, and the level of service of the credit provider)”. At RG 273.71(b), the features a consumer may derive value from include “matters that are more difficult to quantify, such as the service levels and policies of the credit provider”. At RG 273.73(d), the factors you could take into account include “the credit policy and risk appetite of the credit provider”.

Read the three together and the subject is consistent: price, product features, service levels, credit policy and risk appetite. Not the credit provider’s own financial reporting, and not its balance sheet. ASIC’s guidance does not ask a mortgage broker to assess a funder’s solvency, and a late Form 388 is not evidence about a borrower’s best interests.

Two qualifications keep that accurate in both directions. The note following RG 273.73 says the list “is not intended to be an exhaustive list of potentially relevant factors” — so considering a funder’s durability is not prohibited, it is simply not required. And the panel paragraphs are about adequacy of access, not about counterparty risk: RG 273.112 requires you to be satisfied the products you can access and recommend are sufficient to let you act in your consumers’ best interests; RG 273.113 says you “should be accredited with a reasonably representative panel of credit providers”; RG 273.115 says that if you are not satisfied the products and credit providers you can access will allow you to act in a consumer’s best interests, you must not provide credit assistance.

If a broker wrote a file note today saying a lender was removed from consideration because it received an ASIC infringement notice for late accounts, that note would be asserting more than the source supports. The better note records what was asked and what was answered.

6. The exposure sits where the duty does not

The best interests duty under the National Credit Act attaches to credit assistance for credit contracts the Act regulates — consumer credit. A facility written wholly for business purposes generally sits outside that regime, which means no best interests duty, no responsible lending obligations, and no AFCA pathway of the kind a consumer borrower has.

That is the real reason this release is worth fifteen minutes of a diversified broker’s time. On the regulated residential side, the duty is dense, the guidance is specific, and counterparty durability is explicitly not your job. On the commercial, SME and private-credit side — where a broker may be arranging a bridging facility with a hard settlement date, or a development facility drawn in stages — there is no equivalent duty, and whatever diligence happens is whatever the brokerage chooses to do. The regulatory floor is lowest exactly where the funder’s capacity to perform matters most.

That gap is not hypothetical as a supervisory matter either. Private credit sat in ASIC’s 2026 enforcement priorities, as The Adviser reported when they were published, and the 4 November release says the reporting surveillance continues into 2027. Brokers writing commercial and private-credit business should expect more names, and should decide now what they will do when one of them is a funder they use.

7. The part most brokers will miss: your own brokerage

Run the section 45A(3) test over your own group rather than only over your panel. Two of three thresholds: $50 million consolidated revenue, $25 million consolidated gross assets, 100 employees. A single-operator brokerage is nowhere near it. A scaled group with aggregation, asset finance, an insurance arm and acquisitions behind it may be closer than its principal assumes — and the asset test is measured with controlled entities, which is where loan books, warehouses and trail receivables sit.

ASIC’s own data makes the point better than any warning. Of the 234 companies it contacted this year, 82 per cent had allegedly not lodged, and some told ASIC they were unaware of the obligation. These are not companies that decided to defy a regulator. They are companies that did not know the deadline applied to them, or ran out of audit runway. A growing brokerage that crossed a threshold in FY2025 and has never had an audit is the exact profile.

8. What to review this week

The strategic takeaway

The headline version of this story is that ASIC fined two lenders on broker panels. The accurate version is that two lenders allegedly missed a financial reporting deadline, paid a notice that is expressly not an admission of guilt or liability, and that nothing published says anything about their lending.

The useful version is the third one. It is that the only public window into a privately held funder is a document lodged under section 319, that RG 273 never asked you to look through it, and that on the commercial and private-credit side of your book — where no best interests duty applies at all — nobody else is going to look either. Deciding what you check, and writing down that you checked it, is a professional standard your brokerage sets for itself. This week is a good week to set it.

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