It was late last year when the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) started putting in place a timeframe for regulatory changes such as MySuper, reporting that CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business and global data servicing company, noticed the number of data elements that had to be reported had grown astronomically.
“It’s a fairly niche industry in terms of people providing solutions; no-one’s made a large investment in that,” Peter Boyle, managing director, CCH Corporate Reporting Solution, told InvestorDaily.
Jim Edwards, director, CCH Corporate Reporting Solutions, said a quarter of the super industry is implementing CCH’s Integrator data platform now for the current reporting period, but he expected to get “half or three quarters of the industry by the end of this year” using the Integrator tool.
“A lot of funds haven’t acted and haven’t necessarily had the capacity or time or drive to invest ahead of this timeframe so are now urgently calling us saying ‘We need to implement your technology quickly to meet these requirements’,” Mr Edwards said.
“It’s good that APRA has softened some of the timeframes, but it’s still coming very quickly,” he added.
“APRA and ASIC have said [the MySuper] dashboard needs to be produced, and our technology produces this in a standardised manner. A quarter of the super industry has signed up and will be using Integrator commencing right now; reporting starts at the end of this month.”
CCH’s Integrator platform is also currently being used by 75 per cent of the top 50 ASX companies, nine of the 10 largest financial companies, soon to become 10, he said.
Mr Edwards said the integrated reporting can also have significant cost savings for funds, which can be passed back to members.
“We’re not talking about small investments, it’s usually a headcount of two or three in these regulated bodies – insurers, authorised deposit-taking institutions, super funds – and a lot of the work being undertaken by these highly paid accountants is work that can be automated significantly through the use of technology,” Mr Edwards said.
“The quarter of the industry using Integrator for compliance are saving in the order of 80 per cent of the effort that’s currently being invested. These are significant time and cost savings that could be better spent on the funds themselves,” he said.
