INTHEBLACK April 2026 - Magazine - Page 33
how a company is performing,” he says.
Davern sees this mirrored in sustainability
and service-performance reporting, which requires
richer disclosures and metrics about an organisation’s
performance. “That is where we leverage our skills
as accountants — in describing the activities of the
business in different ways and telling the story about
what is going on,” he says.
“I think it is going to change the nature of
accounting back to where we have to use our
judgement, expertise and years of experience to
be able to problem-solve and tell stories in ways
that only human beings can.”
3. TECH OVERHAULS FINANCE OPERATIONS
Beyond AI, the key tech trends disrupting the
infrastructure that supports the profession include
cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) adoption,
real-time data analytics, embedded finance platforms
and advanced process automation, according to
Mitchell Pham ONZM FCPA, director of CodeHQ
in New Zealand and Vietnam.
“Cloud and integration tools enable real-time,
cross-border reporting, which is critical in the
Asia-Pacific (APAC) region’s rapidly digitalising
economies,” he says.
“However, adoption rates and outcomes often
depend on local infrastructure: advanced financial
hubs like Singapore are ahead, while less-developed
markets face challenges.”
4. DIGITAL REPORTING SET TO RISE IN ANZ
Australia and New Zealand are among the few
developed markets still accepting financial reports
in PDF format, even though eXtensible Business
Reporting Language (XBRL) is now used in over
60 countries.
However, change may be coming. In Australia,
the Productivity Commission has recommended
mandatory digital financial reporting for disclosing
entities. In New Zealand, there are ongoing calls
to adopt digital reporting, which is a move
CPA Australia and Davern strongly support.
“If we don’t move quickly to digital reporting,
we will lose the ability to control the narrative,
because it is in tagging the data in XBRL that you are
actually building what things are defined as,” he says.
Although AI systems can extract information from
unstructured sources such as PDFs, Davern explains
that they struggle to interpret nuanced facts. When
data and definitions are structured through XBRL,
AI models can generate insights that are more
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