Asc Looks To See How It Is Going
The Age
Wednesday August 19, 1992
THE slogan could go something like ``The Australian Securities Commission _ We Try Harder". Or to lift a line from another high-profile corporate entity: ``The ASC: Tailoring Company Searches to Your Needs".
Sophisticated corporate lawyers, shelf-company promotors or credit-search agents need not laugh. Australia's national corporate watch-dog, the ASC, has embarked on a nationwide market research project to find out whether the commission is meeting its clients' needs and providing a competitive product.
Many business people may not be aware that the company regulator even provides a product. But with more than 2.2 million inquiries and searches completed a year through 12 national business centres _ including paid requests for extracts, financial documents and company details on Australia's 850,000 companies _ the ASC's market is respectably large.
It took in revenue of more than $187.9 million for the year ending 30June, through both mandatory document lodging and public search facilties. Compared with the Federal Government's $129.6 million to annually fund the ASC, the profit margin is high, as all revenue raised by the ASC is poured back into the Federal Government's consolidated revenue. But, most importantly, the ASC is operating in a virtual monopoly market.
The ASC's director of businesses services and the officer in charge of the marketing campaign, Mr Phil Khoury, concedes that, in the absence of vicious competition, the ASC need not fret about whether the public likes the way it provides information. Mr Khoury says the only competitors the ASC has are mercantile agency groups such as Dun and Bradstreet, which provide ``value-added" corporate information to the marketplace.
``But in our corporate plan we have a commitment to provide service, to create a transparent marketplace," Mr Khoury said, ``so after the honeymoon period of the post-Corporate Affairs Commission era _ when people would tell us that anything we provided was bound to be better than the CAC _ we need to know how well we are doing." Mr Khoury maintains that the ASC is not trying to take market share from other mercantile agencies, but as the ASC makes ``quite a bit of revenue" from information services, he doesn't want people to be too tempted to go elsewhere.
The ASC is now interviewing 400 people around Australia about the services the ASC offers and ways they could be improved, after an initial June qualitative study of lawyers, banks, financial institutions, search agencies, the media and government departments.
The research is being conducted by Chant Link and Associates, which beat market research firms such as BIS Shrapnel, AMR Quantum and Reark to the estimated $60,000 tender. The results are expected to be published next month.
Two rigorous questionnaires, totalling 30 pages, ask respondents to rate the ASC's search facilities, quality of information, flexibility and performance of the organisation, technical knowledge of the staff and, the stickiest point, the cost of the services.
It is here that the ASC may hit a snag. Mr Khoury says he expects respondents to ask for lower search fees, but he says the Government is unlikely ever to cut them. Mr Khoury says there have been many complaints over costs, such as a standard company extract fee of $10, or a computer-generated copy of a company document costing $25 for more than 10 pages.
Added to this is customers' inability to ring for information unless they have an account, or to charge costs to their credit cards, because of Department of Finance rules. Again, Mr Khoury says that despite the expected requests from respondents, not much can be done.
© 1992 The Age
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