APRA’s first System Risk Stress Test found that four major banks and six large superannuation funds could all withstand a severe but plausible shock — and then quietly flagged the mechanism that could turn resilience into contagion.
When super funds pulled liquidity to protect their own members mid-scenario, that withdrawal became a contributor to the very bank liquidity stress the exercise was designed to test.
For risk and governance leaders, “everyone passed” is the least interesting part of this result.
The 30-second take
Individual resilience and system resilience are not the same test.
Every participating bank and fund held up on its own, supported by strong liquidity buffers and central bank access. But the exercise also surfaced concentration risk, mismatched assumptions between institutions, and shared dependencies on common service providers — the exact conditions that turn an isolated shock into a systemic one.
APRA has signalled it will now consult on amended bank liquidity requirements within the next 12 months, informed directly by these findings.
Boards that treat this as “our stress test went fine” will miss the actual signal
What the test actually found
APRA System Risk Stress Test, published 30 June 2026, had four major banks and six large superannuation funds tested against a hypothetical severe but plausible shock covering the links between the banking and super systems. All participants withstood the scenario individually.
The vulnerability inside the resilience
Superannuation funds’ withdrawal of funding, made to protect their own members under stress, became a contributor to the idiosyncratic liquidity stress each bank modelled. The same funds also showed a willingness to inject new equity capital into the banking system during the downturn — a dual role of stabiliser and stressor that most institutional risk frameworks don’t currently model together.
The key findings included:
- System vulnerabilities that could amplify stress events.
- The response of superannuation funds to stress events can materially affect their members, banks and financial markets.
- Some vulnerabilities in the system are likely to increase as the superannuation system grows and matures.
- Better entity preparedness for stress events across industries will make the financial system stronger.
What’s next
APRA will use the findings to inform proposed amendments to bank liquidity requirements, opening for consultation within 12 months, alongside updated core supervisory activity for both banks and super funds.
“As our financial system becomes more interconnected, decisions made in one part of the system not only impact other financial institutions in the same sector, but those in different sectors as well as service providers.
Ask your organisation
- If we are a bank, have we modelled superannuation fund behaviour as a potential liquidity risk, not just a source of stable long-term capital?
- If we are a super fund, do we know at what stress threshold we would withdraw bank funding to protect members — and have we mapped the system-wide effect of that decision?
- Do we share critical service providers with competitors or counterparties, and have we tested what happens if that provider is stressed at the same time we are?
- When APRA opens consultation on liquidity requirement changes, who in our organisation owns the response, and do we have the modelling capability to engage with it properly?
- Has our board seen the SRST findings presented as a systemic governance issue, rather than filed as “an APRA report about other institutions”?
A test everyone passes individually can still be signalling a system-level gap.
So, have you stress tested your organisation yet?