Invest-Ops Australia 2026 – Investment Operations Challenges Forum is a two-day, in-person and virtual forum designed specifically for Australia’s superannuation and investment operations community. Taking place on 8–9 September 2026 in central Sydney, the forum brings together asset owners, service providers, regulators and technology leaders to tackle the most pressing operational, regulatory and transformation challenges facing investment operations today.
With a strong focus on CPS 230 alignment, operational resilience, front-to-back integration, data reliability, outsourcing, AI adoption and future operating models, the program is highly practical and grounded in real-world case studies, panel discussions and peer exchange.
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Learn schedule, program and topics of the 9th annual Invest-Ops Australia 2026 Conference
• CPS 230 commenced 1 July 2025 — APRA's focus has shifted from implementation evidence to demonstrated, tested capability
• Third-party and fourth-party risk management is now a board-level obligation under CPS 230, not a procurement function
• Where is the gap between what funds have documented and what they could evidence under supervisory scrutiny?
Presenter: TBA
• How CPS 230 has changed operational risk management and accountability in super funds
• Impacts on outsourcing, third-party risk, and service provider oversight
• What implementation looks like in practice: governance, reporting, and board engagement
• Key lessons learned and how super funds are embedding resilience beyond minimum compliance
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
10:20 Morning Coffee & Networking Break
• CHESS Replacement went live April 2026; global T+1 is compressing FX execution windows; 24/5 trading is forcing a rethink
of settlement infrastructure
• Managing risk during market infrastructure change requires tested contingency procedures and a granular understanding
of third-party dependencies
• Tokenisation is moving from concept to operational reality — what are the practical implications for settlement, custody
and reconciliation?
• Regulators expect real-time visibility across settlement exposure, fails management and collateral positions
• Unlisted asset valuation methodologies
• The regulator’s views on valuations
• Liquidity risk, concentration risk, transparency and arbitrage opportunities
• Fees and performance
• Volatility and diversification benefits of unlisted assets
• Private credit opportunities and risks
• Can super fund achieve high returns without unlisted assets
• Unlisted assets and daily pricing
KYLE RINGROSE
Principal Consultant Athena IOC
• The inaugural APRA system-wide stress test (November 2025) found that rebalancing created a disproportionate impact on some members — annual exercises with capital-like buffer expectations are now permanent
• The sector's aggregate FX hedge book has reached approximately $500 billion; only two Australian super funds are approved
for ISDA SIMM
• T+1 settlement is compressing FX execution windows — automated pre-trade currency forecasting is becoming an operational requirement, not a future-state aspiration
• What governance and infrastructure gaps is a future APRA stress test likely to expose?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
12:50 Lunch Break & Networking
• The platform market has consolidated around State Street Alpha, BlackRock Aladdin with eFront, and SimCorp One — funds still on legacy architectures face an increasingly urgent decision
• Implementation experience is now substantial enough to move past vendor positioning — what have funds actually
encountered during migration that wasn't visible at business case stage?
• IBOR/ABOR convergence remains unresolved for many funds — what are the governance and FAR accountability implications of getting it wrong?
• What does business-as-usual operations look like post go-live — where are the genuine efficiency gains, and where have new operational risks emerged?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
14:35 AFTERNOON TEA & NETWORKING
• The Australian custody market has consolidated to five or six global custodians — at that level of concentration, traditional
SLA monitoring is not a sufficient oversight framework
• CPS 230 has elevated third-party risk management to a board-level governance obligation — how are funds evidencing it to
APRA?
• Data dependencies between funds and custodians are deepening — how are funds managing reconciliation gaps when custodian data underpins risk reporting and regulatory compliance?
• What SLAs and KPIs actually matter when the relationship is under pressure — and what does the conversation look like from the custodian's side?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
• Unlisted asset allocations are at historic highs in many funds, yet daily pricing governance frameworks remain inconsistent
across the industry
• APRA's December 2024 thematic directly implicates unit pricing — out-of-cycle revaluation frameworks, valuation independence and board oversight of pricing policies all found wanting
• Unit pricing errors in large funds can affect millions of members and trigger costly remediation programs — the controls must
match the risk
• Is the industry managing unit pricing complexity, or is complexity getting the better of the industry?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
17:00 Networking Drinks
• Investment operations has long been framed as a cost and compliance function — the evidence increasingly shows that operational excellence is a direct source of competitive advantage and member value
• Where does operational alpha come from — automation reducing cost, data quality enabling better investment decisions, or
operational speed allowing funds to act on opportunities that slower competitors cannot?
• What separates the funds building genuine operational capability from those managing the function as a necessary overhead?
• What does the investment operations function look like at the leading edge — and what does it take to get there?
Presenter: TBA
• Scenario modelling has historically required specialist expertise, significant time and manual integration into reporting — AI
agents can now deliver structured, multi-factor forecasts from a text prompt
• The challenge is not just speed — it is delivering outputs with the accuracy, transparency and governance controls that allow investment teams to act on them with confidence
• Live demonstration: modelling a geopolitical scenario — such as Middle East instability — and translating the output into
portfolio intelligence, including charts, reports and flagged areas for action
• AI in scenario modelling is designed to augment investment team judgement, not replace it — governance controls and analyst validation are built into the workflow
Presenter: TBA
10:05 Morning Coffee & Networking Break
• Most funds have run at least one AI pilot in investment operations — the critical question for 2026 is what it actually takes to reach production deployment with governance that satisfies APRA
• The technology is rarely the constraint — what are the risk appetite settings and change management challenges that determine whether AI pilots advance or stall?
• What model risk frameworks are funds building to govern AI in investment operations — and how are they addressing
hallucination, data leakage and model drift?
• Where is AI delivering measurable operational improvement in production today — and where has the gap between pilot promise and production reality been most significant?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
• Group 2 super funds face mandatory climate disclosures from 1 July 2026 — by September, funds will be mid-way through their first reporting cycle
• Scope 3 financed emissions data for unlisted assets remains the most intractable challenge — GP cooperation is inconsistent
and the data gap between reporting obligations and available data is significant
• Climate disclosure internal controls must meet financial-reporting grade — what does the operational infrastructure for defensible disclosure actually look like?
• Data sourcing, system integration, internal review, legal sign-off and the audit trail required to support limited assurance — who in the investment operations function owns each of these?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
• Private credit has grown 75% in two years to approximately $27 billion in APRA-regulated funds — operational infrastructure
has not kept pace
• Valuation methodology gaps are acute: assets are marked less frequently than listed equivalents and consistency across managers is limited
• Irregular reporting cycles, non-standard data formats and limited GP cooperation create reconciliation gaps that traditional
operational frameworks struggle to manage
• What operational controls are funds putting in place to manage private credit at scale — and what does the board need to be asking management to evidence?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
12:50 Lunch break & Networking
• Internalisation is an operational program, not a strategic option — the data infrastructure, control frameworks and FAR-aligned accountability structures must be built ahead of asset growth, not alongside it
• Internal teams require real-time access to clean, validated data from custodians, prime brokerages, market data vendors and alternative investment platforms — most funds are still building the architecture
• FAR creates new accountability mapping challenges for internalised functions — the governance structures required must be
explicitly designed for an internal management environment
• Attracting and retaining investment operations professionals capable of supporting sophisticated internal mandates requires different talent and remuneration frameworks than oversight of external managers
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
• Payday Super introduces a structural change to the cash flow profile of super funds — contributions flowing with every pay cycle creates a materially different liquidity management challenge
• Daily contribution flows into portfolios with large unlisted allocations will increase the operational burden on unit pricing
functions already under APRA scrutiny
• Liquidity buffer requirements and rebalancing triggers built for quarterly contribution flows may not be adequate for the demands of Payday Super at scale
• What investment operations changes are funds prioritising ahead of the implementation window?
Presenter: TBA
15:05 Afternoon Tea & Networking
• EU and UK T+1 is targeted for October 2027 — funds with offshore equity sleeves need FX automation, pre-trade currency forecasting and same-day settlement capability built now, not at deadline
• Offshore allocations are approaching 50% in large Australian funds — multi-currency operations, FATCA and CRS reporting, and jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements are straining infrastructure built for a domestic book
• Cross-border data management is one of the least-discussed operational risks in Australian super — maintaining consistent
data standards across international offices is technically demanding and error-prone
• What operational infrastructure investments are proving most critical as funds build genuine global portfolio management capability?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
• Offshore allocations approaching 50% in large funds have made cross-border tax compliance a primary operational burden
— FATCA, CRS, withholding tax reclaims, and jurisdiction-specific reporting all require operational infrastructure that many funds have not yet built
• The Burton case (Federal Court ruling on foreign income tax offsets) continues to have practical implications for how FITOs are calculated, passed and disclosed — are operations teams confident in their approach?
• What tools and systems are improving accuracy and timeliness of tax calculations across complex multi-asset, multi-jurisdiction portfolios?
• How do tax and investment operations teams collaborate effectively — and where does the ownership gap create the most risk?
Moderator: TBA
Panellists: TBA
Closing remarks from the Chair
