Long-serving ASIC deputy chair Peter Kell will quit the agency in December after more than seven years in senior roles at the battle-scarred watchdog.Kell, a former executive director of the peak consumer advocate, Choice, joined ASIC in 2011 after a brief stint as deputy chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission during Graeme Samuel's reign as chairman.Kell's major achievements at ASIC included the crackdown on payday lenders and the granular interrogation of conflicts of interest in the mortgage broking sector.Most of Kell's time as ASIC's deputy chair since 2013 was taken up with a tide of issues and conflicts stemming from vertical integration in the financial services industry.Those problems, which the Hayne royal commission has shown led to systemic misconduct across the banking and financial advice sectors, were partly the (somewhat ironical) outcomes of internal arguments he lost at the ACCC.Banking Day understands that as deputy chair of the ACCC in the last decade, Kell argued unsuccessfully against approving several mergers involving banks.They included NAB's 2009 acquisition of Challenger's mortgage management business, which delivered the major bank control of several of the country's largest aggregators - PLAN, Choice and FAST. Soon after arriving at ASIC in 2011, one of Kell's fates was to take on the challenge of overseeing root and branch reviews of deep conflicts in the mortgage supply chain.Kell's departure will come almost eight months before he was expected to leave the regulator in May.Despite recent criticism of ASIC's handling of misconduct in the financial services industry, federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg yesterday paid tribute to Kell's contribution to ASIC."His experience and understanding of corporate regulation has been appreciated by successive governments as well as members of ASIC," the treasurer said."The coalition government thanks Mr Kell for his contribution to ASIC and wishes him well in his future endeavours."Kell's replacement as deputy chair is Daniel Crennan QC who has been given a special mandate to focus on strengthening ASIC's enforcement actions.Frydenberg announced Kell's departure after confirming the appointment of senior Treasury official, John Lonsdale, as a full-time member and second deputy chair of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority.Lonsdale, who been given tenure of five years in the new role, joins the prudential regulator amid the controversy over the way it has policed misconduct by superannuation trustees in the last decade.