Narelle Smythe

Narelle Smythe has over 29 years' experience in financial services regulation. She has acted for domestic and international financial services providers on complying with financial services regulation, as well as in regulatory investigations and enforcement proceedings and M&A transactions.

Her experience extends to financial services, credit, privacy, anti-money laundering, fraud, and bribery and corruption. She is adept at managing complex, large-scale, multi-faceted investigations and in devising and rolling out effective remediation programs, as well as identifying and managing the regulatory issues arising on financial services projects or M&A-related transactions. She covers the gamut of financial services regulation, including Chapter 7 of the Corporations Act, NCCP, Financial Crime (AML/CTF Act and sanctions), Banking Act, Privacy Act, Payment Systems (Regulation) Act and industry codes (e.g. Banking Code, BNPL Code, AFIA on-line small business lending Code), as well as legislation impacting activities in the sector (e.g. the SPAM Act and Do Not Call Register Act).

With her deep understanding of financial services regulation and businesses, she can adroitly identify and manage the regulatory issues that may arise in a financial services project or a regulatory investigation or enforcement.

In her decades of advising clients in this field, Narelle has acted for clients in many firsts, and clients commonly refer to trusting Narelle with their most-important and most-complex work.

Her clients include the traditional banking sector, BNPL providers, other financiers, payment service providers and technology companies.

She is a key trusted and longstanding adviser to many clients, including acting for the Reserve Bank (in its capacity as regulator of payment systems) in payment systems reform for almost 20 years.