Speaking to InvestorDaily, IQ Group chief executive Graham Sammells heaped praise on the superannuation funds that successfully lodged their reports by the first quarterly deadline of 28 October 2013.
“There was really only a short space of time between when the rules were finalised and reporting time. It's a pretty significant achievement,” he said.
Super fund administrator Link Group announced this week that 47 of its clients had lodged their APRA reports electronically.
But according to Mr Sammells, the reporting process is “a lot of work” and some of his firm's clients have taken a 'let's keep doing what we used to do' approach – which, he said, would not be sustainable in the long run.
Other funds have made a deeper investment in improving their data practices, which will make sure they can continue to meet the quarterly reporting deadlines, he added.
“The real thunderstorm comes next July, for the financial year 2014 annual submission of all the investment disclosure. That's another order of magnitude of volume and complexity again,” Mr Sammells said.
Under current regulations, super funds will have to provide significant amounts of detailed data about their portfolio holdings – although there is considerable lobbying underway to “reduce the detail and the volume of data”.
“Who knows if that will change the regulations as they stand or not?” said Mr Sammells. “Notwithstanding, there's going to be a fairly mad scramble in order to collect the data, manage it, and then report it and disclose it to all the appropriate avenues.”
The investment disclosure is particularly difficult because the fund has to go through various channels to extract the details of the underlying asset – the custodian, the investment manager and then the actual fund, he said.
“The clients we work with have a busy schedule of things they have to get done between now and July next year.”
