On 3 September 2026 the Reserve Bank of Australia addressed two significant questions for payment and digital-asset firms. It published a joint RBA and Treasury paper, Retail Central Bank Digital Currency in the Australian Context: An Update, concluding that there is no clear public interest case for a retail CBDC in Australia. On the same…
On 3 September 2026, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) imposed licence conditions on ING Bank Australia Limited (ING Australia), raised the bank’s minimum liquidity requirement and applied a $50 million operational risk capital add-on. The trigger was a multi-year overstatement of the bank’s Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR). ING Australia had been reporting an LCR…
On 27 August 2026 the Reserve Bank of Australia’s Payments System Board met and reported developments across four areas: it endorsed the annual assessment of ASX’s clearing and settlement facilities against the Financial Stability Standards, discussed progress on the account-to-account (A2A) payments roadmap, endorsed the proposed approach to consulting on the future role of the…
On 25 August 2026, the Reserve Bank of Australia set out how far along it is on what it calls the road to ample. In a Sydney speech, the RBA’s Head of Domestic Markets, David Jacobs, described the central bank’s transition to an RBA ample reserves framework, a demand-driven regime for supplying the Exchange Settlement…
On 18 August 2026, APRA imposed licence conditions on Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Limited over what it described as longstanding and pervasive weaknesses in the bank’s non-financial risk management framework. The action is worth reading closely by every Australian authorised deposit-taking institution, because APRA reached for a power that sits underneath the banking authority itself…
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank has admitted it breached its accountability obligations under the Banking Executive Accountability Regime (BEAR), and on 10 August 2026 the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) filed civil penalty proceedings against it in the Federal Court. The parties have jointly proposed that the bank pay an $8 million pecuniary penalty, subject to…
On 27 July 2026, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) confirmed that it will remake three of the APRA Level 3 conglomerate standards before they automatically lapse on 1 October 2026. The three instruments are Prudential Standard 3PS 221 Aggregate Risk Exposures, Prudential Standard 3PS 222 Intra-group Transactions and Exposures, and Prudential Standard 3PS 310…
On 1 July 2026 the United Kingdom took over the two-year Presidency of the Financial Action Task Force and used its first day to launch the FATF 2026-2028 Roadmap on Combatting Fraud. The launch event, opened by the incoming FATF President Giles Thomson and supported by Executive Secretary Violaine Clerc, set fraud as one of…
On 8 July 2026 the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) opened a consultation on amendments to its superannuation data collections, with written submissions due by 21 August 2026. The package targets two returns that registrable superannuation entity (RSE) licensees know well: SRS 533.0 Asset Allocation and SRS 610.2 Membership Profile. APRA proposes to amend both…
On 8 July 2026, the Account-to-Account (A2A) Payments Roundtable published the final A2A payments vision report, setting the long-term direction for Australia’s A2A payments system. The report contains a one-sentence vision statement and does not itself amend a statutory reporting return, filing deadline or technical reporting specification. That is exactly why the vision is worth…