The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) set out its 2025 governance priorities for APRA-regulated superannuation trustees, highlighting intensified scrutiny of how member money is spent and signalling a forthcoming review that would clarify, simplify and consolidate core governance prudential standards across banking, insurance and superannuation. Alongside this focus, APRA released 2024 fund-level expenditure data, which will now be published annually. APRA said it is reviewing the latest expenditure dataset for outliers that may not appear to be in members’ best financial interests, building on earlier supervisory messaging on trustee spending. It also pointed trustees to its thematic review of valuation and liquidity risk governance, which covered 23 trustees representing about 80% of APRA-regulated superannuation assets and found that 12 require material improvement in valuation governance, liquidity risk frameworks, or both, including weaknesses in board oversight and conflicts management. Operational risk management was framed as another immediate governance test point given implementation of Prudential Standard CPS 230 this year, with APRA observing underdeveloped and legacy operational systems in parts of the sector. On the standards review, APRA said it intends to update Governance SPS 510 and Fit and Proper SPS 520 without revisiting ownership models, with an aim to move to a single cross-industry standard covering board governance, fit and proper and conflicts, while exploring opportunities to streamline overlap between “accountable persons” under the Financial Accountability Regime and “responsible persons” under fit and proper requirements. APRA expects to release a governance discussion paper soon and engage with leaders across superannuation, banking and insurance on the proposed changes.

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