Calls for Australia to adopt mandatory digital financial reporting are growing louder.

With Australia being one of just two advanced economies globally that has not embraced digital-reporting standards such as XBRL, experts believe the nation must overhaul current regulations requiring only hard-copy or PDF financial reporting.

In August 2025, Deloitte and CA ANZ hosted an invitation-only event in Sydney, bringing together investors and stakeholders from government, regulators, standard-setting bodies and consulting firms to discuss the issue.

CA ANZ CEO Ainslie van Onselen declared that “digital reporting is the low-hanging fruit of productivity and economic reform” and Deloitte Australia CEO Joanne Gorton FCA commented that doing so would help “unlock the power of AI, cut through complexity, and give businesses and investors better, faster insights”. Sue Lloyd FCA, vice-chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board, suggested Australia could “leapfrog” others for digital reporting of climate and sustainability disclosures and Financial Reporting Council chair, Andrew Mills, called on multiple government agencies to play their part in the switch.

At the think tank, Deloitte Access Economics partner John O'Mahony reminded attendees of the firm’s modelling from two years ago showing that mandatory digital financial reporting for all large Australian businesses would grow the economy by up to A$7.7 billion annually.

“The bad news, colleagues, is that we’re not going to get A$7.7 billion of benefit for our economy by 2030 and that's because we didn’t start two years ago, after we did the research,” O'Mahony told attendees, noting that any economic windfall has been “pushed back”.

Invisible to investors

CA ANZ has strongly pressed the case for mandatory digital reporting for years, including to the Productivity Commission.

Although Australian companies can voluntarily report digitally, not one ASX-listed company has done so since 2010 – chiefly because of the absence of a legal mandate, concerns about implementation costs and a lack of value to individual companies without widespread adoption.

“You all have to be speaking the same language for real benefits,” says Amir Ghandar FCA, reporting and assurance leader at CA ANZ. “Otherwise, it's a little bit like someone coming into a meeting in Sydney and starting to talk in Swahili.”

XBRL is a widely used digital reporting standard that enables a consistent, computer-readable reporting format that is usable by AI for accurate analysis.

Without digital reporting, XBRL International, Inc. CEO John Turner, who featured on an expert panel at the Sydney session, suggests that Australian markets are “becoming invisible” and missing out on opportunities to boost reporting transparency and investor access. “For an economy like Australia, which has a very successful set of national and international investors, making sure those people are as informed as possible really is very important.”

Productivity push

In a promising sign, in mid-August 2025 the Productivity Commission released its latest interim report, Harnessing Data and Digital Technology, exploring how the nation can improve productivity growth. It recommends that the Australian Government make digital financial reporting “the default” for disclosing entities and is calling for feedback from businesses.

Think tank attendees heard that predicted implementation costs for digital reporting have decreased since Deloitte released its report two years ago because of advances in technology.

Mills agrees that a reporting evolution could deliver cost-of-capital benefits and better corporate and government decision making. He adds, however, that companies need to be convinced of the value of digital reporting and that multiple government agencies which receive reports, including the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC), should play their role.

“It’s not just ASIC, though,” Mills says. “It needs to be APRA, it needs to be the ASX, it needs to be the ATO. It needs to be all of those bodies saying ‘Yes, we will receive this information in this form’ and I think that that’s an incredibly important part of the sell.”

Global opportunities

Ghandar welcomes the Productivity Commission’s recommendation, adding that discussions with international investors show current reporting practices in Australia “are just not working”.

Acting now could streamline scores or even hundreds of corporate reports that governments demand each year, he adds. “There’s billions, if not trillions, of dollars of potential investment with investors who just won’t even consider our shores while we are in the dark in terms of our reporting.”

Lloyd spoke compellingly at the Sydney session about why digital reporting is essential to meet the surging demand for climate and sustainability-related financial information, noting that “investors are continually looking for more efficient ways to consume these big volumes of information available to them”.

She adds that as AI technology improves, it will make it easier to search for, extract and compare information, but it will not remove the need for structured, computer-readable datasets.

Turner is confident that using XBRL widely and wisely can have an impact on the global performance of Australian companies. He advises them to think of XBRL as a system of “feedback loops” between regulators, businesses and investors, taking full advantage of financial data by enabling improved reporting practices.

“Embedding those feedback loops into the change process is one of the most important aspects of this whole exercise,” Turner says. “The quicker you can get into that fast improvement cycle, the more efficient, more effective and more valuable Australian data will be in this country and around the world.”

The next steps

The Sydney event ended with a live poll indicating 89% of attendees favoured a move to mandatory reporting, with most hoping it would be adopted by 2028.

To assist with the transition to mandatory digital reporting, in a June 2025 report CA ANZ has recommended key steps in Australia, including:

• Amending the Corporations Act 2001 to require disclosing entities to lodge their annual and half-year financial reports in digital form

• Adopting the XBRL digital reporting format

• Calling for the government to invest in digital reporting infrastructure.

Van Onselen believes the digital reporting recommendation by the Productivity Commission in its latest interim report is an important step forward “and a clear validation of our call to action”.

“It’s a recognition of CA ANZ’s leadership in shaping a smarter, more resilient economy.”

Find out more

CA ANZ supports the adoption of digital reporting in Australia and New Zealand, and has outlined the insights shared at the August 2025 roundtable in the insights paper Accelerating reporting with technology for a more productive Australia. Read the full report here.