FSI on Challenges in Implementing Innovative Reporting Initiatives

The paper describes a framework for looking at the key innovations that have taken place at key points in the regulatory reporting process. Using this framework, the paper further presents different regulatory reporting initiatives from these authorities. The paper highlights that innovations are enhancing the quality of regulatory data and setting the basis for achieving the ultimate objective of moving towards the concept of "data-sharing." However, authorities face a number of issues and challenges in the implementation of their regulatory reporting initiatives, with reconciling the different interests of various stakeholders and addressing legacy systems being the key challenges. Financial authorities are addressing these constraints by either tailoring the new reporting approaches to different types of financial institutions or providing financial grants or technical support to assist with implementation.

In terms of technology, the complicated process of disentangling closely intertwined legacy systems leads to a strong preference for the status quo, which in turn makes it challenging to get buy-in. Based on the experience of authorities covered in this paper, there may be certain preconditions for a regulatory reporting initiative to succeed. These include strong commitment and support from top management at both financial authorities and financial institutions, a well-defined centralized data strategy and data governance framework within financial authorities and the effective management of the transition to new regulatory reporting processes. While it is still not being actively pursued by financial authorities and may be viewed as aspirational, distributed ledger technology, or DLT, has the potential to fundamentally transform the way data is managed by replacing today’s practice of financial institutions keeping different records of the same transaction. 

Looking ahead, while a shift to a “data-sharing” concept may take time, the trend toward more granular and integrated reporting is very likely to continue. For the “data-sharing” concept to become a reality, the right technology and data standardization are critical. However, the technology to implement this concept is still being developed. While data standardization is certainly attractive since it can significantly simplify the regulatory reporting process, implementing it on a wider scale raises financial, practical, and competition issues. Consequently, a widespread shift to the “data-sharing” concept is unlikely to happen in the near term. Many authorities have already started their journey toward more granular and integrated reporting and more will possibly follow. The implementation may take different forms. Larger financial institutions are expected to be subject to more data standardization, especially for reporting areas with cross-border elements in which data interoperability is important. Several initiatives toward data standardization are already underway at the regional (particularly in Europe) and international levels. 

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Keywords: International, Banking, Insurance, Securities, Reporting, Data Sharing, Granular Data, Integrated Reporting Framework, Statistical Reporting, Suptech, Regtech, FSI, BIS