In this context, the 10th Executive IFRS Workshop for Regulators, convened by the Centre for Financial and Sustainability Reporting Reform on June 10-11, 2026, brought together 18 banking and insurance regulators from the Western Balkans, Eastern Europe, and the South Caucasus for two days of substantive exchange in Vienna, Austria. 

The Workshop aimed to provide updates to financial and prudential regulators on : (i) new IFRS Accounting Standards, such as IFRS 18—Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements, and IASB projects to enhance those standards, including the project on Risk Mitigation Accounting (RMA), (ii) selected supervisory priorities of the Austrian Financial Market Authority (FMA) for the financial sector, (iii) tools supporting credit risks detection and analysis or building on AI capabilities that will inform the future capacity of supervisors to oversee and regulate banks and insurance undertakings, and (iv) experience with the implementation of IFRS 17—Insurance Contracts. 

Key Takeaways from presentations and working sessions

1-In the area of new IFRS Accounting Standards, the workshop focused on the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) Agenda, the new IFRS 18 – Financial Statements and Disclosure Accounting Standard and the Risk Mitigation Accounting (RMA) project:    
The IASB has reduced its agenda from 20 projects to 12, with only six being standard setting projects. This will enable the IASB to be more effective and timelier in delivering its projects. 

• Under IFRS 18 (effective from January 1, 2027), two new subtotals are required to harmonize the presentation of the statement of financial performance across IFRS reporting entities. These are:  (i) operating profit and (ii) profit before financing and income tax. IFRS 18 introduces additional disclosure requirements published  in a single note to the financial statements: (i) the reconciliation back to the IFRS-defined subtotal of Management performance measures (MPMs), (ii) an explanation of why each MPM in reported, (iii) the methodology used to calculate each MPM, and (iv) any changes made to those. MPMs, are non-IFRS metrics reflecting management’s view of business performance -  an important insight for investors and regulators. IFRS 18 also introduces targeted reclassifications of income and expenses in the statement of financial performance.
• The RMA project of the IASB addresses how companies account for addressing the risk induced by the repricing risk exposure. The new accounting model should better reflect how financial institutions manage interest rate risks and therefore provide useful information to users of financial statements.  The new requirements will be added to IFRS 9 - Financial Instruments and will result in suppressing previous requirements under IAS 39.

2-In Austria, sustainability risks have been a focus since 2021 and the FMA has provided implementation guidance to companies they supervise. These risks are increasingly relevant for the financial sector and financial institutions need to integrate sustainability risks mitigation into their processes and strategies. Financial institutions benefit from using AI in areas such as fraud detection or natural language processing. They are, however, only exploring generative AI, because of the several risks it presents: (i) models are not transparent to users, (ii) few dominant providers exist, and (iii) uncertainties remain the responsibilities and liability for  possible damages arising from AI use. On supervisory processes, AI may assist facilitating supervisory processes, but it needs to be supervised, and its outputs needs to be reviewed. 

3-On tools supporting credit risk detection, the World Bank Financial Sector Advisory Center provided insights into a hands-on tool supporting the assessment of the corporate viability of borrowers through a financial analysis of several ratios calculated from published financial statements, as well as other data collected on loans:  this tool can provide another lens for supervisor assessing credit risks. 

4-On the prudential reporting side, modern technology could help simplify complex, overlapping reporting requirements. Many EU-level rules call for data that overlaps with other requirements. As a result, banks and insurance companies are at risk to having to maintain multiple reporting systems built on the same underlying data. Simplifying the requirements themselves would be the ideal fix. But technology can help too: by drawing on comprehensive databases and applying rules across overlapping data sets, it can simplify reporting and cut the number of tools companies need. AI is also now built into several tools' interfaces, helping supervisors query data in plain language.

5-Finally, on IFRS 17 – Insurance Contracts, information was provided on how a South-African bank and insurance group implemented the standard and on key challenges faced. Some products such as private pension and life insurance products are more common in South-Africa than in the Western Balkans, but  similar products could be developed in the coming years in the later countries. The complexity of implementing of IFRS 17-Insurance contracts  is lesser for contracts of one year or less. Selected implementation issues that insurance regulators face during IFRS 17–Insurance Contracts  implementation were discussed including  managing the change project, preparing new reporting templates, and computing regulatory impacts. Most countries in the Western Balkans are implementing the IFRS 17 Standard – Insurance Contracts in the coming two years.

Feedback and Expected Impact

Feedback for this year’s workshop was very positive, with a global rating for the forum of 4.8 out of 5. Participants expressed continued interest in the issues brought to their attention by the CFRR during the Executive IFRS Forum, including financial instruments and insurance contracts accounting, and sustainability reporting. 

The lasting impact of the Executive IFRS Workshop series will be an enhanced regulatory and supervisory capacity, ensuring national supervisors are better equipped to monitor financial stability and guide local institutions through a quality adoption of complex standards.

The 10th Executive IFRS Workshop for Regulators was delivered under the REPARIS for SMEs and the EAASURE programs managed by the CFRR. REPARIS for SMEs is financed by the European Union, and EAASURE is financed by the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs of Switzerland, the Federal Ministry of Finance of Austria, and the Austrian Development Agency.