A record jail sentence for insider trading was adequate but fines need to be tougher, the corporate regulator says.
Former National Australia Bank employee Lukas James Kamay, 26, was last week sentenced to seven years in jail for using market sensitive Australian Bureau of Statistics data to net $7 million.
Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft said he was pleased with the sentence, even if it was short of the maximum 10-year term.
"It's the longest sentence in insider trading history," he told reporters on Monday.
"We're pleased with the outcome.
"What's important is you send a deterrent message to people about insider trading."
But Mr Medcraft said fines for insider trading needed to be tougher as ASIC's computer programs are updated to monitor suspicious trades in real time.
"It shouldn't be that if you make half a million from insider trading, you get fined $50,000 - that's a bit of a shortcoming isn't it, really?," he said.
Cyber security was also discussed at ASIC's annual conference in Sydney.
ANZ chief executive Mike Smith said it would be "extremely difficult" for regulation to keep pace with technological threats to cyber security.
"It's unrealistic for us to think that it can," he said.
Business Council of Australia president Catherine Livingstone, who is also the chairwoman of Telstra, said regulators would fail to foresee future problems if resources were wrongly directed.
"I think for regulators just as for business, we need to be making sure that we're not so focused on today's or yesterday's problem that we miss tomorrow's emerging problem," she said.
John Laker, the former chairman of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, said regulators weren't best placed to tackle cyber security breaches.
"Regulators themselves are not skilled to do the science," he said.
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