Building the business case for modernising regulatory reporting technology in 2026

For many regulated organisations, regulatory reporting is technically “working”.

Reports are produced, submissions are made, and compliance obligations are met. Yet behind the scenes, the effort required to keep reporting running continues to grow — driven by regulatory change, increasing data complexity, tighter scrutiny, and growing reliance on manual processes and key individuals.

As organisations plan for 2026, this is prompting a familiar question across finance, risk and regulatory reporting teams: if reporting is still working today, why invest in new technology now?

Why this question is surfacing now

The regulatory environment itself has not suddenly changed overnight. Reporting standards remain central and non-negotiable.

What has changed is the context in which regulatory reporting operates. Regulators are investing in stronger data and analytics capabilities, and regulatory data is being used in more ways than ever before. Expectations around explainability and consistency are increasing.

At the same time, many organisations are operating reporting environments that were designed for a different era — one focused on producing individual returns rather than supporting continuous analysis and reuse of data.

This creates a growing gap between what reporting technology was originally designed to do, and what it is now being asked to support.

The pressure points that are converging

In practice, several pressures are converging at the same time:

Regulatory analytics and scrutiny. As regulators become better equipped to analyse data across entities and over time, inconsistencies, unexplained movements and late-stage adjustments are easier to identify. Systems designed primarily for submission often struggle to support this level of interrogation.

APRA Connect as a catalyst. Even where the transition to APRA Connect has been completed, it has acted as a forcing function — exposing underlying architectural constraints, data quality issues and process fragility that were previously manageable. With APRA planning to finalise the D2A to APRA Connect transition for all industries by 2027, all entities will be required to revisit their reporting processes in the near term.

Granularity and reuse expectations. Reporting increasingly relies on granular datasets that need to be reused consistently across prudential, statistical, risk and financial reporting. Many legacy platforms remain report-centric, making reuse difficult without duplication.

Transparency beyond the regulator. Regulatory data is no longer used solely for compliance. It increasingly feeds public disclosures, peer comparison and stakeholder scrutiny, raising the stakes for accuracy and explainability.

Individually, each of these pressures is manageable. Together, they compound.

The hidden cost of "good enough"

One of the challenges in building a business case for change is that the costs of existing reporting environments are often hidden.

They do not always appear as explicit technology spend. Instead, they show up as:

• Heavy reliance on spreadsheets and manual reconciliations

• Parallel builds of the same data across teams

• Late adjustments and extended reporting cycles

• The entire reporting process depending on three people who can't take leave at the same time

• Difficulty responding to new or changing requirements without rework

Consider a typical example: one financial institution recently discovered that producing their set of quarterly returns required 47 spreadsheets maintained by 12 people across 5 teams. The process worked, but was largely undocumented and relied entirely on institutional knowledge.

Over time, these costs accumulate — not just financially, but in operational risk, staff fatigue and reduced confidence in reported outcomes.

From an executive perspective, this creates a reporting function that is compliant, but increasingly fragile.

What does "modern" regulatory reporting technology actually mean?

This raises an important question: what does modernisation actually mean beyond simply being newer?

Modernising regulatory reporting is not simply about replacing one tool with another. In practice, modern regulatory reporting platforms are designed around a different set of principles — and importantly, these principles can be adopted progressively rather than requiring a wholesale transformation.

Workflow and controls embedded in the process Preparation, validation, analytical review, sign-off and evidence managed as part of the reporting lifecycle, not outside it. This is the foundation — sometimes called "last mile" reporting — and represents the minimum capability organisations need to manage regulatory submissions with confidence and control. It addresses the governance, validation and audit trail challenges that spreadsheets and email-based processes cannot adequately solve.

Traceability and explainability by design The ability to understand how figures are derived, adjusted and approved without reconstructing the process after the fact. Whether working with data from existing systems or building transformation logic within the platform, this capability ensures regulatory submissions can be defended and explained.

Data-first rather than form-first Treating regulatory returns as views over governed datasets, rather than standalone artefacts. This becomes increasingly important as organisations move toward end-to-end automation, where source data is transformed and mapped to regulatory taxonomies within a single platform.

Built for change Designed to absorb new requirements, additional granularity and evolving standards without structural rework. This matters both at the last mile (responding to form changes and new validation rules) and across the full data pipeline.

Integration with existing systems Working alongside current data warehouses, risk systems and financial platforms rather than requiring wholesale replacement. Modern platforms meet organisations where they are, whether that means consuming prepared data or reaching back to source systems.

These principles matter not because they are technologically elegant, but because they reduce operational risk and improve resilience as expectations increase. Importantly, organisations don't need to implement all capabilities at once — many start with last-mile governance and workflow, then progressively build toward fuller automation as requirements and maturity evolve.

Framing the business case

The business case for modernising regulatory reporting technology extends well beyond avoiding future problems.

In practice, it is grounded in:

Operational efficiency — reducing manual effort through automation and data reuse. Where reporting cycles currently require weeks of spreadsheet reconciliation and manual checking, modern platforms can compress this to days, freeing skilled resources for higher-value analysis rather than data assembly.

Risk reduction — lowering reliance on manual processes and key individuals. Moving from knowledge held in people's heads and undocumented spreadsheets to systematic, auditable workflows.

Cost predictability and control — avoiding the escalating effort that comes as requirements evolve. The true cost isn't the technology — it's the compounding burden of manual workarounds as complexity increases.

Scalability — supporting additional returns, granularity and scrutiny without linear increases in workload. Being able to respond to new requirements by configuring rather than rebuilding.

Insight and preparedness — understanding what your data is telling you before the regulator asks. Modern platforms provide analytical capabilities that let you identify trends, outliers and potential issues proactively, rather than discovering them during regulatory review.

Confidence — in reported outcomes, internal explanations and external scrutiny. Knowing you can explain not just what was reported, but how it was derived, validated and approved.

Seen through this lens, the question becomes less about whether to modernise, and more about when — and under what level of pressure.

Why 2026 is a sensible inflection point

For many organisations, 2026 represents a practical point to reassess the foundations of regulatory reporting.

Planning cycles are resetting, major regulatory infrastructure changes are underway, and reporting systems are already being touched to accommodate evolving expectations. This creates an opportunity to address underlying architecture and process design, rather than continuing to add layers on top of existing constraints.

The risk in delaying is not that reporting will suddenly fail — but that it will continue to become more expensive, more fragile and harder to change.

The real question is not whether modernisation is needed, but whether organisations choose to address it proactively on their terms, or reactively under pressure.

At Reg360, we see organisations using this moment to step back and reassess whether the technology underpinning regulatory reporting is fit for how reporting is increasingly being used — not just how it has traditionally been delivered.

If you're evaluating your regulatory reporting foundations for 2026 and beyond, we'd welcome the conversation. Contact us to discuss how Reg360 can support your reporting objectives as requirements evolve.