GRC Report Staff

The European Banking Authority spent much of last year preparing to oversee companies that are not banks. That may sound like an administrative detail, but it isn't. For most of its existence, the EBA's job was largely to write rules, refine standards and help build the regulatory architecture that emerged after the global financial crisis. The institution became one of the principal architects of Europe's banking framework, translating political agreements into thousands of pages of technical requirements.

Australian financial institutions may soon find themselves under stricter governance expectations, but with fewer forms to file. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority released the latest draft of its overhauled governance standard, moving into the final stage of a review that has occupied the regulator for more than a year and generated extensive debate across banking, insurance and superannuation.

Apple's cloud business has become the latest test case for Europe's digital competition rules. Italy's Competition Authority said it has opened an investigation into Apple over whether the company is giving rival consumer cloud providers the same access to iPhone and iPad features that it reserves for its own iCloud service.

Somewhere inside a government agency, a public institution, or a private company, an employee is almost certainly pasting information into an AI tool that nobody formally approved. The employee is probably not trying to circumvent policy. They are trying to get through their workday. A chatbot can summarize a report in seconds. A coding assistant can solve a technical problem faster than a colleague can respond to a message. An automated note-taking application can generate meeting minutes before participants have even left the call. The attraction is obvious. So is the speed with which these tools have spread through workplaces.

Australia's stock exchange operator has admitted it misled the market about the status of its long-running CHESS replacement project, setting the stage for a proposed $13.3 million (AUD $20.5 million) penalty and a further $1.95 million (AUD $3 million) contribution toward regulatory costs.

The past year offered no shortage of challenges for Europe's insurance and pensions sectors. Geopolitical tensions remained elevated, cyber threats continued to evolve, extreme weather events became more frequent, and advances in artificial intelligence forced regulators and financial institutions alike to confront new opportunities and new risks. The European insurance watchdog spent 2025 trying to balance two objectives that do not always sit comfortably together: strengthening oversight while reducing regulatory complexity.

Tönnies Unternehmensbeteiligungen has been fined €1.15 million by Austria's Cartel Court after completing an acquisition months before notifying competition authorities, despite the deal ultimately receiving regulatory approval. The penalty stems from Tönnies' acquisition of a shareholding in Ritzenhoff, a manufacturer and distributor of glass and ceramic products. According to the Austrian Federal Competition Authority (AFCA), the transaction was completed on September 6, 2023. The company did not notify Austrian regulators until April 16, 2024.