On 11 March 2025, the Insurance Commission (IC) and the National Privacy Commission (NPC) issued Joint Advisory No. 2025-001 (“Joint Advisory”), or Considerations on the Use of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) in the Insurance Industry.
The Joint Advisory values the adoption of PETs in the insurance industry, which may supplement existing privacy-preserving practices to mitigate data privacy risks and ensure protection of personal data processed by personal information controllers (PICs) and personal information processors (PIPs).
The Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) has released a new set of advisory guidelines (Advisory Guidelines) aimed at enhancing the resilience and security of cloud services and data centers in Singapore. These Advisory Guidelines are part of Singapore’s broader digital infrastructure strategy and reflect growing emphasis on the systemic importance of digital services and infrastructure to both the economy and daily life.
On 19 February 2025, the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issued a regulatory roadmap for Hong Kong’s virtual asset market. Entitled “‘A-S-P-I-Re’ Roadmap for a Resilient Virtual Asset Ecosystem”, it sets out a five-pillar framework (Access, Safeguards, Products, Infrastructure, and Relationships) that is intended to serve as a strategic action plan for addressing emerging new priorities in the virtual asset space (e.g., managing liquidity fragmentation and ensuring investor protection across decentralized and centralized platforms) and, in the SFC’s words, “future-proof[ing] Hong Kong’s VA ecosystem”.
ASIC has released a draft regulatory guide alongside a consultation paper intended to help providers of Buy Now Pay Later services understand the modified responsible lending obligations and requirements.
On 10 March 2025, the Health Sciences Authority launched its public consultation for the draft on the Best Practices Guide for Medical Device Cybersecurity. The document provides medical device manufacturers and healthcare providers with best practice recommendations and considerations on general cybersecurity principles to protect the security of medical devices for their entire product life cycle.
On 7 March 2025, the Ministry of Health announced a host of changes to the healthcare system to address the shifting needs of the Singapore population. These changes included a review of advertising regulations for certain healthcare professionals, the recognition of family medicine as a medical specialty and the introduction of registration requirements for psychologists.
On 4 March 2025, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) released transitional guidelines to help businesses navigate the transition to the new mandatory and suspensory merger control regime which comes into force on 1 January 2026.
The Guidelines set out details on key dates and processes for how the ACCC will manage merger clearance reviews during the transition period. The ACCC is encouraging businesses to voluntarily notify transactions under the new regime from 1 July 2025 to avoid the potential need for re-notification if the ACCC is unable to complete its review in time.
On 12 February 2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued the Measures for the Administration of Personal Information Compliance Audit (“Audit Measures”), which will take effect from 1 May 2025. The draft of the Audit Measures was first released for solicitation of public comments on 3 August 2023, and it took a year and a half for CAC to finalize the Audit Measures. In the final version of the Audit Measures, there are a few notable changes compared with the draft version, which reflect the evolving and more relaxed data protection regulatory stance of the CAC.
On 11 February 2025, the Singapore government announced new AI safety initiatives, namely: (i) the Global AI Assurance Pilot for best practices around technical testing of generative AI applications; (ii) the Joint Testing Report with Japan; and (iii) the publication of the Singapore AI Safety Red Teaming Challenge Evaluation Report. These initiatives aim to enhance AI governance, innovation and safety standards.
On 18 February 2025, ASIC commenced consultation on proposals to:
1. provide additional relief for Australian financial services and credit licensees from reporting certain breaches of the misleading and deceptive conduct (MDC) provisions and certain contraventions of civil penalty provisions (CPPs); and
2. consolidate this additional relief and the relief in ASIC Corporations and Credit (Breach Reporting — Reportable Situations) Instrument 2024/620 (ASIC Instrument 2024/620) into a single instrument.
The proposals, as further described in CS 16, aim to reduce the reporting burden on Australian financial services and credit licensees. ASIC’s rationale for the changes is, under the current reportable situations regime, some reports of MDC and CPP breaches have been of minimal intelligence value to ASIC.