Hawking Prohibitions: Stopping Unsolicited Selling and Protecting Customers
Understanding the Hawking Prohibitions
Australia’s hawking prohibitions restrict unsolicited offers, sales or issue of financial products to retail clients. The rules target pressure-selling and mis-selling practices by requiring clear consent before discussing products, ensuring relevance to a consumer’s needs, and preventing opportunistic cross-selling during unrelated interactions. For superannuation, insurance, investment and credit-adjacent products, governance must ensure sales only occur where the consumer has meaningfully agreed to receive the offer.
Why Hawking Rules Matter
Hawking enforcement has become a conduct priority. Weak controls risk regulatory action, remediation, and reputational damage. Strong governance reduces complaints, supports DDO outcomes, and builds trust by ensuring customers only receive offers that are appropriate, timely and consent-based.
Key implications for firms include:
Consent capture and scope: prove a customer agreed to be contacted about that specific product/topic.
Context control: avoid ambushing customers during service calls about unrelated matters.
Call, chat and digital script discipline: wording, flows and disclosures aligned to hawking rules.
Monitoring & QA: evidence that sales interactions met consent and suitability guardrails.
Vulnerable customer safeguards and clear opt-out pathways.
Key Challenges Facing Firms
Designing consent journeys that are explicit yet friction-light across phone, branch and digital.
Preventing context drift in conversations (service → sales) and managing real-time controls.
Building script libraries and approvals that stay current across products and campaigns.
Calibrating QA sampling, speech analytics and MI to detect non-compliant approaches.
Aligning hawking controls with DDO TMDs, complaints (RG 271) and breach reporting (RG 78).
How OCG Can Help
Oceanic Consulting Group (OCG) helps institutions translate hawking prohibitions into practical, defensible operating controls.
Our services include:
Policy & playbooks: consent standards, contact rules, and conversation guardrails.
Consent design & evidence: journeys, wording, storage and expiry/refresh logic.
Scripting & enablement: approved call/chat/email templates and sales aids.
QA & monitoring uplift: speech/text analytics, sampling models, breach triggers and MI.
Assurance & remediation: independent reviews, shadowing, and rapid corrective action.
Vulnerable customer protections embedded across channels.
FAQs
What counts as “unsolicited” contact?
Any approach without clear, prior consent from the customer to discuss that product/topic, or where the contact context doesn’t reasonably relate to the offer.
Can we discuss a different product during a service call?
Only where it’s within the scope of consent and relevant to the customer’s needs; otherwise it risks breaching hawking rules.
How do hawking rules interact with DDO?
DDO requires distribution to the target market; hawking ensures customers aren’t pressured or surprised with unrelated offers. Both must align.
Strengthen Your Hawking Controls
Work with OCG’s Conduct & Distribution Specialists
Protect customers and your licence with consent-led, well-evidenced sales practices. Contact OCG to implement policy, scripts, monitoring and assurance that prevent unsolicited selling and support DDO-aligned outcomes.
