This is the second edition of Five to Follow, our monthly curation of stories worth tracking beyond the headlines. It runs alongside our companion monthly article, Regulatory Digest, which covers the full sweep of developments, including smaller and sector-specific regulators.
The regulator that expanded, then enforced
On 1 July 2026, Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing (AML/CTF) regime expanded to cover lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, conveyancers, and dealers in precious stones and metals. The Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) went from roughly 19,000 regulated entities to close to 100,000, virtually overnight.
Within days, AUSTRAC finalised two long-running enforcement cases against existing registrants. On 3 July, it closed its enforceable undertaking with Sportsbet, accepted back in May 2024, after an independent auditor confirmed the company had implemented and operationalised remediation across five required compliance areas. On 6 July, AUSTRAC entered a fresh enforceable undertaking with bet365, requiring the operator to overhaul its risk assessment methodology and suspicious matter reporting after an audit found serious gaps. bet365 must submit a progress report by December 2026 and complete a final compliance audit by mid-2027.
“When controls fall behind, the consequences extend beyond a single company,” AUSTRAC chief executive officer Brendan Thomas said of the bet365 case.
The sequencing is not incidental. A regulator that just increased its regulated population fivefold used the same fortnight to demonstrate what happens when existing registrants fall short. It is a deliberate display of enforcement capacity, timed precisely when tens of thousands of new entities are deciding how seriously to take their own obligations.
For more on what the Tranche 2 expansion means in practice, see our July digest.
The regulator that started supervising the cloud
From 13 July, the Bank of England, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) began jointly overseeing the UK’s first designated Critical Third Parties: Amazon Web Services EMEA, Google Cloud EMEA, Microsoft Ireland Operations, and Oracle Corporation UK.
The regime, finalised in November 2024, gives financial regulators direct supervisory reach into the infrastructure providers that banks and insurers depend on but have never been required to answer to a financial regulator themselves. This is the first live application of that framework, and it names four global technology companies as subject to financial-resilience oversight for the first time anywhere.
The premise is straightforward: a bank’s operational resilience is only as strong as the cloud infrastructure underneath it, and no amount of bank-level supervision addresses a failure at that layer. The harder question is whether regulators built to examine balance sheets and liquidity ratios have the technical capacity to meaningfully supervise hyperscale cloud operators, or whether the designation is, for now, mostly symbolic. Other jurisdictions, including Australia and Canada, are watching to see which it turns out to be.
Our July digest covered the regime’s finalisation. This is the first test of it in practice.
The scheme still waiting for its verdict
The Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) £7.5 billion motor finance redress scheme, suspended by the Upper Tribunal within two days of its implementation deadline, now has a date. The Tribunal has set a substantive hearing for 14–18 December 2026, with a fallback window of 16–26 February 2027 if postponed.
On 20 July, the FCA published updated operational guidance clarifying what lenders must and must not do in the interim: no calculating compensation, no making payments, no notifying customers of amounts owed, but continued identification of in-scope complaints, data validation, and remediation preparation. FCA chief executive Nikhil Rathi has previously described the scheme as “an enormous redress event, second only to PPI,” and warned the Treasury Committee in June that further delay risked the process beginning to resemble the protracted PPI saga it was designed to avoid repeating.
That timeline is now contingent on a legal question the Tribunal has yet to answer: whether the FCA can impose mass redress across 12.1 million agreements without individual proof of loss in each case. If the scheme survives December’s hearing and is not appealed, the FCA still expects payments to begin sometime in 2027. A successful challenge could push things into 2028 or beyond, with the FCA required to redesign its approach entirely.
Lenders face a real, ongoing operational cost in the interim: systems must stay ready for a scheme that might not exist in its current form six months from now. For the 12.1 million consumers awaiting compensation, the practical effect is the same – the wait has simply acquired a calendar.
TMR covered the suspension itself previously. This instalment covers what comes next.
The regulator whose review kept widening
Canada’s Competition Bureau opened a formal examination of the country’s food supply chain on 16 June 2026, seeking public input on what is driving food affordability pressures. In the weeks since, the examination has drawn in two parallel threads that were not originally part of its scope.
On 22 June, the Bureau obtained court orders advancing its investigation into Empire Company Limited’s use of property controls – restrictive covenants that can prevent competitors from opening grocery stores near existing Sobeys, Safeway, IGA, Foodland, and FreshCo locations – across the country. On 2 July, it reached an agreement with BVD Petroleum to preserve competition in retail fuel supply around St. Catharines and Niagara Falls, after determining a proposed acquisition would have eliminated a significant local competitor. Interim Commissioner of Competition Jeanne Pratt said “competitive gasoline markets are necessary to keep prices in check,” adding that the agreement would “preserve competition for Canadians travelling between St. Catharines and Niagara Falls.”
None of these three actions were announced as a single coordinated strategy. But taken together, they suggest something more deliberate than scope creep: an examination framed around one question – why is food expensive – functioning as an entry point into grocery real estate practices and regional fuel markets that a narrower mandate would never have reached. Submissions to the original examination remain open until 4 September.
1 July and the limits of simultaneous change, one month on
Last month, TMR examined the structural pile-up of 1 July commencement dates across Australia and New Zealand. A month on, the pattern has produced its first real evidence of strain, and of adaptation.
In New Zealand, the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) absorbed consumer credit regulation from the Commerce Commission on 1 July. It gained stop-order powers the Commerce Commission never held under the previous regime. Whether and how the FMA exercises that authority in practice is one of the more consequential open questions to watch through the rest of 2026.
Taumata Arowai, the water services regulator, published its Network Environmental Performance Report 2024/25 on 27 July. It recorded the highest per-connection water loss of any council nationally at Grey District Council – nearly 13 per cent above the second-highest council and more than three times the eighth-highest figure that drew separate local coverage. The finding landed in the same reporting cycle in which the council, already facing prosecution filed by Taumata Arowai in June, was named.
In Australia, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reported A$830 million in court-ordered civil penalties for the 2025–26 financial year, its strongest enforcement year on record. That came even as it absorbed the AUSTRAC-adjacent compliance questions generated by Tranche 2.
None of this proves regulators have solved the compression problem. It suggests some are choosing to answer it with visible enforcement rather than quiet accommodation, which is a different, and arguably more sustainable, response than simply absorbing the load and hoping compliance catches up on its own.
The August 2026 Regulatory Digest covers the month’s developments in full.
