The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has published a new international standard for reporting financial instruments called IFRS9.

The main aim of IFRS 9 is to increase the relevance of accounting provisions to transfer information from the organisation to investors and to the regulators about those events that can be reliably forecast. This will in turn reduce the noise from arbitrary effects as a result of errors and really making accounting provisions relevant, as far as possible, to investors. The new standard fundamentally alters earnings and the balance sheet that are reported on.

With less than a year to final implementation date, most organisations should be preparing to conduct a parallel run with the respective reporting to follow. However, this is generally not the case and there are still many milestones to be reached prior to 1 Jan 2018.

In this paper, we will outline how the Standard has evolved from IAS39, the changes that have been proposed and a detailed analysis in terms of technology, resource, modelling and data as well as the actions to be considered in adopting to IFRS9.