If 2025 was the year financial services learned to measure sustainability performance, 2026 will be the year they’re required to prove it.
By 2026, regulation in financial services will no longer feel like a series of isolated compliance events. It will feel continuous, interconnected, and deeply tied to how finance teams operate day to day.
Across banks, insurers, and capital markets firms, regulators are raising expectations around data quality, transparency, resilience, and accountability. The shift is subtle but significant. Compliance is no longer just about meeting rules. It is about proving control.
Here are the regulatory drivers shaping financial services in 2026 and what finance leaders should be preparing for now.
Prediction 1: Regulatory Focus Shifts from Disclosure to Data Integrity
Financial reporting has always been regulated. What’s changing is where regulators are looking and how they assess compliance.
By 2026, scrutiny is moving beyond the final filing to the systems, processes, and controls behind it. Regulators increasingly want proof that firms can trace every number back to its source, explain how it moved, and defend why it changed. That means demonstrating:
- Clear data lineage from source systems to reported figures.
- Consistency across financial statements, notes, and management commentary.
- The ability to explain changes quickly and confidently.
In this environment, manual reconciliations are like handwritten maps in a GPS world. They may still work but only until something changes. And change is exactly what regulators are testing for. For finance leaders, weak data foundations are becoming a regulatory risk, not just an operational inconvenience.
Prediction 2: Radical Transparency Will Replace Performative Disclosure
Regulators are drawing a hard line between ambition and evidence. Across sustainability and financial disclosures, vague claims and high-level narratives are becoming liabilities. New regulations such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and tightening green-claims legislation are pushing organisations toward specificity, traceability, and comparability.
“Performative messaging is out. Radical transparency is in.”
– Rory Burghes, Head of Sustainable Futures at Capgemini UK
Organisations are increasingly acknowledging where progress falls short and even admitting when targets may be out of reach. Early adopters who have been reporting for several years are now entering a phase where ESG reporting is treated as business-as-usual, rather than a one-off or compliance exercise.
Adam Elman, Director of Sustainability EMEA at Google, reinforces this reality:
“For 2026, vague sustainability pledges are out. Abstract claims simply don’t connect, and they expose brands to greenwashing risk.”
Despite political pushback in some regions, we will see many more companies committing to ESG reporting. In 2026, credibility will come from evidence, not intent. Radical transparency isn’t just a regulatory expectation; it’s becoming a competitive advantage.
Prediction 3: AI Will Help CFOs Emerge as Enterprise Strategy Leaders
By 2026, the role of the CFO will extend far beyond financial stewardship. Finance leaders will increasingly sit at the center of enterprise strategy, using advanced AI and cloud platforms to influence growth, risk, and transformation decisions across the organization.
The shift is already visible. 57% of finance leaders now rank among the top influencers of enterprise strategy, according to Deloitte. At the same time, CFO role expectations have expanded rapidly, with required skills increasing 19% over five years, and expectations around risk leadership more than doubling.
What’s powering this change is technology. Nearly half (48%) of strategy-driving finance leaders are deploying cloud-based platforms to optimize costs, compared to just 33% of finance leaders in support roles. They are also further ahead on AI adoption—37% report clear, measurable value from AI, more than double their peers.
As Hewlett Packard Enterprise CFO Marie Myers puts it:
“We’ve reimagined the role of finance—moving from traditional stewardship to proactive leadership, enabled by data, AI, and digital transformation.”
Prediction 4: Reporting Will Shift From Periodic to Continuous Readiness
Monthly and quarterly reporting cycles will increasingly feel outdated. CFOs are moving toward an always-ready model where reporting, forecasting, and compliance are continuously maintained rather than assembled at period-end.
Growing pressure on finance teams to shorten close cycles while improving transparency and control, pushing organizations toward real-time data validation instead of end-of-period reconciliations. Deloitte reports that finance leaders are expected to deliver faster insights without sacrificing accuracy, accelerating the move away from static spreadsheets.
As a result, reporting will evolve from fixed snapshots to continuously updated disclosures, supported by connected systems and automated data flows.
Why this matters in 2026
- Regulators are reducing tolerance for late adjustments and post-filing corrections.
- Audit scrutiny is moving earlier in the reporting cycle.
- Continuous controls and data lineage are becoming table stakes for compliance.
Prediction 5: Data Governance and Connectivity Will Become Non-Negotiable
By 2026, CFOs will treat data governance and connectivity as core financial control. Fragmented legacy systems will increasingly fail under the weight of AI adoption, real-time reporting demands, and regulatory scrutiny.
As finance teams rely more on automated insights and continuous reporting, disconnected data foundations expose risks around quality, traceability, and accountability. Siloed systems may still store financial data, but they cannot provide the lineage, transparency, or auditability that regulators and boards now expect.
ERP remains the system of financial record. However, CFOs are increasingly deploying a Unified Data Layer (UDL) that combines ERP and non-ERP data such as sales, operations, HR, supply chain, and ESG into a single connected view. This integrated architecture enables real-time analytics, forecasting, and AI-driven insights across the business.
Traditional ERP may tell you what happened. The UDL shows CFOs what is happening now and what to do next across the business. Confidence comes not from speed alone but from always knowing where the numbers came from, how they changed, and what they mean for decision-making.
Why 2026 Demands a Different Reporting Mindset
Across every prediction, one theme keeps resurfacing: connectivity.
Disconnected reporting environments make it harder to manage change, explain outcomes, and defend decisions. In contrast, connected disclosure management enables finance teams to:
- Maintain a single source of truth.
- Link numbers and narratives across reports.
- Manage updates without breaking compliance.
- Create transparent audit trails.
Finance leaders who treat reporting as a controlled, connected, and repeatable process will adapt with confidence. Those who delay will find compliance harder to defend, more expensive to maintain, and increasingly exposed as scrutiny intensifies. Data-centric disclosure management gives finance teams a single source of truth, clear data lineage, and alignment between numbers and narratives as requirements evolve.
At IRIS CARBON®, we are leveraging connectivity, data-centricity and AI to help finance leaders stay in control, in a fast-shifting regulatory landscape.
This is where platforms like IRIS CARBON® fit naturally into the finance workflow. By connecting data, disclosures, and controls in one environment, finance teams can shift from managing deadlines to maintaining readiness.
