Dimity Kingsford Smith

Professor Kingsford Smith holds a research chair as the MinterEllison Professor of Risk and Regulation at UNSW Law. She is also the Director of the Centre for Law Markets and Regulation a partnership between UNSW Law and the UNSW Business School. Professor Kingsford Smith teaches in the areas of corporations law and regulation of securities and financial products. She has taught master of laws courses on corporate governance and on the regulation of online investing. She supervises a number of postgraduate research students on a wide range of corporate and financial regulatory questions. At the moment these range from ethics of corporate lawyers through the regulation of derivatives to development of more lively bond market in Australia. She is also very interested in corporations and securities regulation in developing economies, and has supervised PhDs in this area. She also supervises Master of Laws and Honours theses.

Professor Kingsford Smith’s own research and publication is in the areas of corporate and financial regulation and regulatory theory and policy. She has been the first chief investigator in an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant 2005-08 examining the regulation of online investing. Entitled ‘One Day, We’ll All Invest This Way! Regulating Online Investment’ the project included leading Australian, US, Canadian and UK researchers. With the growth of retail investment more generally, Professor Kingsford Smith has extended her research to legal and empirical consideration of the effectiveness of disclosure as a regulatory technique in consumer investment. She has published work which considers to what degree disclosure may need supplementation by other regulatory approaches. In 2009 she published research on the effect of the global financial crisis on retail investors. More recently she has led a large ARC Linkage Grant on the professionalisation of the financial sector and has done contract research for the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Professor Kingsford Smith is member of the ASIC External Advisory Panel. She was also a member of the Treasury Taskforce reviewing the Enforcement Powers of ASIC in 2017. Between 2015 -2017 Dimity Kingsfrod Smith was the NAB Wealth Customer Advocate and in 2018 she has done a small amount of consulting for the CBA on customer policy and regulation. Between 2011-2016 Prof Kingsford Smith was a member of the Code Committee of the New Zealand Financial Markets Authority and between 2007 and 2014 chaired the Conduct Review Commission a disciplinary panel in the financial services sector.