APRA published its 2026-27 Corporate Plan with three strategic priorities: maintaining financial system safety and stability, getting the regulatory balance right, and improving organisational effectiveness.
Supervision priorities for the next 12–18 months include ensuring regulated entities strengthen resilience to AI-enabled cyber threats and stepping up focus on quantum computing risks. APRA will also assess how entities identify, assess and manage risks arising from concentrated reliance on common technology platforms and material service providers. Governance practices across banks, insurers and superannuation funds remain under scrutiny, with new requirements expected to take effect in early 2028.
On the policy side, APRA will consult on a package of superannuation reforms that includes development of a risk-sensitive capital framework to support the Government’s proposed new member compensation scheme. The framework is intended to ensure trustees offering higher-risk investment options have the financial capacity to meet potential compensation obligations.
Australian superannuation funds face heightened supervisory attention on operational resilience and governance. This is likely to raise compliance and assurance costs and may influence liquidity, valuation and execution standards applied to alternative investments. The planned risk-sensitive capital framework for member compensation introduces a new capital dimension into trustee risk budgeting. Depending on final design, it could alter the relative capital cost of higher-risk or less-liquid assets and therefore affect portfolio construction for long-dated retirement liabilities. Peer regulators and large public pensions monitoring operational-resilience and capital frameworks will watch both the intensity of supervision and the eventual calibration of the capital rules.