The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) has published its latest Corporate Plan with a focus on ensuring the risk management practices of banks, insurers and superannuation trustees keep pace with a rapidly moving threat environment.
APRA's 2026-27 Corporate Plan sets out APRA's strategic priorities for the coming four years as well as its policy and supervision agenda for the next 12 to 18 months.
The Plan has been built around three strategic priorities:
- Maintaining financial system safety and stability - so that the system can absorb shocks and continue to provide critical services to households and businesses;
- Getting the balance right - so APRA delivers its primary financial safety and stability objectives without undue cost for industry; and
- Improving APRA's organisational effectiveness - so APRA's people can continue to act quickly and decisively in an increasingly uncertain world.
APRA Chair John Lonsdale said the Plan sought to sustain the resilience of Australia's financial system in the face of a highly uncertain and volatile risk environment.
"As we look across the operating environment, it's clear that the international and domestic economic environments remain challenging. Geopolitical tensions continue to have economic impacts on inflation, trade relationships and cost-of-living pressures. At the same time, technological developments are creating new threats and amplifying older ones, while also creating competitive challenges for traditional business models.
"Responding to these challenges, our latest Corporate Plan is focused on strengthening industry's resilience to geopolitical tensions, cyber-attacks and frontier AI, growing interconnections across the financial sector and an increased reliance on service providers. We will also continue to support productivity, further reducing burden on industry through initiatives that streamline and simplify our prudential standards."
APRA's supervision priorities for 2026-27 include:
- ensuring regulated entities are strengthening their resilience to AI-enabled cyber threats, and stepping up APRA's focus on quantum computing risks;
- assessing how entities identify, assess and manage risks associated with industry's concentrated reliance on common technology platforms and material service providers;
- reinforcing minimum expectations for managing geopolitical risk and subjecting entities to more intensive supervision to ensure gaps are addressed in a timely manner;
- undertaking targeted thematic reviews of banks' lending practices to ensure they remain prudent, given the potential for less favourable economic conditions;
- commencing work on a new system-risk stress test to further strengthen APRA's understanding of risks from linkages between sectors and the overall impact for financial stability; and
- requiring selected large superannuation trustees to appoint an independent party to undertake a deep dive review of their valuation governance practices.
Key policy priorities include:
- consulting on a package of superannuation reforms including the development of a risk sensitive capital framework to support the Government's proposed new member compensation scheme;
- finalising new requirements that will strengthen governance practices of banks, insurers and superannuation funds, which are expected to come into effect at the start of 2028;
- finalising targeted changes to the bank capital framework, while commencing consultation on revisions to bank liquidity standards;
- jointly consulting with ASIC on proposed changes to the Financial Accountability Regime (FAR) to reduce administrative burden for industry without undermining accountability standards; and
- developing a new prudential framework for large stored value facility (SVF) providers and working with ASIC on joint guidance to support implementation (subject to the Government finalising relevant reforms).
Mr Lonsdale said APRA's policy agenda this year aims to have a net neutral impact on regulatory burden with new regulatory requirements to be broadly offset by simplification elsewhere in the framework.
"Over the past year, APRA progressed a range of initiatives that are delivering meaningful cost savings for industry. This year, we will go further by streamlining prudential requirements, removing duplicative reporting and providing greater flexibility for entities in meeting regulatory obligations.
"We also need to ensure our own people have the skill and resources needed to act quickly and decisively in a more complex and uncertain world. The Corporate Plan sets out how we will improve our organisational effectiveness, including through better use of AI, to make sure we are ready for future challenges, that we improve our agility and that we strengthen our productivity and impact."
The 2026-27 Corporate Plan is available on the APRA website at: APRA Corporate Plan 2026-27 .
