Small to medium-sized businesses will have an opportunity to access crowd-sourced funding to help them begin or grow their business when the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) releases its new crowd-sourced funding (CSF) regime on September 29, 2017.

ASIC Commissioner John Price said: “Crowd-sourced funding provides an opportunity for small to medium-sized businesses to access an alternate source of capital without the regulatory burden of traditional fundraising.

“ASIC’s new guidance will help public companies and crowd-funding platform operators comply with their obligations under the CSF regime, while supporting investor confidence.”

Crowd-sourced funding is only available to public companies not listed on a stock exchange, such as ASX, and allows investors to invest up to $10,000 a year in return for ordinary shares.

For more information on how to invest through crowd-sourced funding, visit ASICs Moneysmart page on crowd-sourced funding.

Regulatory Guide 261 Crowd-sourced funding: Guide for public companies (RG 261) will assist companies seeking to raise funds through CSF to understand and comply with their obligations in the new regime, particularly as many of these companies will not have experience in making public offers of their shares.

ASIC has also published a template CSF offer document to help companies prepare their CSF offers.

Regulatory Guide 262 Crowd-sourced funding: Guide for intermediaries (RG 262) will assist crowd funding platform operators (‘intermediaries’) seeking to provide a crowd-funding service, particularly as this is a new type of financial service and there are unique gatekeeper obligations for operating platforms for CSF offers.