GRC Report Staff

Austria’s financial sector is entering 2026 on solid footing, according to the country’s financial watchdog, but the risks facing banks, insurers, and markets are becoming more complex and more global. In presenting its Goals and Priorities for Supervision for 2026, the Austrian Financial Market Authority said it will sharpen its focus on resilience and stability while pushing to streamline supervision and cut unnecessary bureaucracy.

Sustainability is no longer being treated as a reputational add-on or a long-term aspiration. According to HSBC’s Sustainability Pulse Survey 2025, it is increasingly being positioned at the centre of business growth, competitive strategy, and investor decision-making.

Malaysia has made real strides in strengthening its defenses against money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing over the past decade, but enforcement outcomes continue to lag behind the country’s growing investigative capabilities. That is what a new mutual evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) is saying, based on an on-site assessment carried out in February 2025.

Poland’s competition and consumer protection authority has fined P4, the operator of the Play mobile network, about $27 million (PLN 108,573,207) after ruling that a widely used discount scheme unlawfully penalized customers who paid their bills late.

TIGO Guatemala has agreed to pay more than $118 million to resolve a U.S. investigation into a years-long bribery scheme that prosecutors say was baked into the company’s local operations and designed to influence lawmakers in Guatemala.

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined password manager provider LastPass £1.2 million following a 2022 data breach that exposed the personal information of up to 1.6 million UK users, concluding that the company failed to implement sufficiently robust security measures despite offering a service designed to improve online security.

The International Sustainability Standards Board released targeted amendments to its IFRS S2 Climate-related Disclosures standard, responding to practical challenges companies have encountered as they begin putting the new climate rules into practice.