IReF reporting seamlessly integrated in SAP S/4HANA

The shift to IReF/BIRD marks a paradigm change in regulatory reporting: instead of form-centric submissions, the focus will be on providing granular, standardized data points. For banks, this means not only new reporting requirements but a fundamental review of data models, data quality, governance, and reporting processes. At the same time, regulatory workloads are already rising sharply: Financial Crime Compliance studies show increasing costs at 98 percent of financial institutions in EMEA and 99 percent in the US and Canada; moreover, the employee time spent on regulatory activities in banks increased by 61 percent between 2016 and 2023 (Bank Policy Institute). The detailed IReF implementation plan is currently being prepared by the ECB; based on the ECB’s current planning, official reporting is scheduled to begin in 2031, following a pilot phase from 2030. Organizations that standardize their SAP reporting infrastructure early reduce fragmentation, reconciliation effort, and project risk.

Many regulatory reporting vendors mandate cloud deployment, but for a large number of financial institutions that is not an option. Strict BaFin/ECB requirements, IT security policies, and ongoing on-premises investments make a near-term switch impractical. DORA has required a complete register of all ICT third-party agreements with contractual audit rights since January 2025, and external cloud solutions substantially increase documentation complexity. A reporting solution embedded directly in SAP S/4HANA sidesteps this barrier – your regulatory reporting stays where your data already lives.

Every additional external tool in the regulatory reporting chain creates integration overhead: data must be extracted from SAP, transformed, and loaded into third-party systems, each with its own interfaces and failure points. BIRD Reporting requires multiple data transformation layers. DORA demands immutable audit trails and automated log aggregation for all ICT systems, meaning every external component must be fully audited. An SAP-native reporting approach that maps BIRD/IReF directly in S/4HANA removes the extraction and third-party layer, cutting integration and compliance complexity substantially.

Proprietary reporting platforms frequently operate as a black box: internal logic is not transparent, adjustments require expensive vendor services, and switching providers carries high migration costs. DORA has required a complete register of all ICT third-party agreements and contractual audit rights since January 2025. Violations of DORA can – depending on national implementation – be sanctioned significantly, with discussion of penalties in the region of up to 2% of global revenue and personal accountability for senior management. An ABAP-based SAP regulatory reporting solution built on open standards (BIRD data model) keeps the logic transparent and inspectable – and markedly reduces dependency on proprietary black-box platforms.