No need to delay reporting standards, says Milestone

If super funds implement the right processes for the new data reporting standards being introduced by the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA), they should not need an extension on implementation, says Milestone Group.

The reporting standards were not just a data management challenge but rather a core fund information management challenge, according to Milestone's managing director, client relationships & business development for Asia-Pacific, Mark Neary.

Meeting the reporting requirements required a holistic end-to-end process, according to Milestone.

"It's more about managing how you control all the calculation where you've got multiple parties involved, multiple points where data arrives, multiple depths of granularity in the data. How do you bring that together in a way that you can say to the fund's governance processes, ‘we are satisfied that these numbers are correct'," Neary said.

VIEW ALL

View all

He said it was about implementing transparency, process management and control across the business.

"There's no reason why the approach that you take wouldn't lead you down that strategic path from day one," Neary said.

Milestone Group chief executive Geoff Hodge said getting the data, being able to transform it and generating a report were the simple processes in the legislation.

Moving data through a set of rules around how data was aggregated, processed and validated so that the process was traceable back to the underlying data element was the complex part, according to Hodge.

He said funds were expecting the regulatory requirements to introduce huge overheads, but the right implementation could save costs and also undermine the need for an extension on some reporting standards, as suggested by APRA's deputy chairman Ross Jones at the Conference of Major Superannuation Funds last week.

"If the assumption is that the only way this kind of thing can be done is with spreadsheets and manual labour or data management tools and reporting tools, then I think yes, it will be complicated, it will be labour intensive and you'll find...you've then got to have a second bite at fixing this problem.

"Our point is there's an opportunity to do it right the first time," he said.