UK Watchdog Seeks Help To Streamline Regulatory Reporting

Josh O'Neill

22 February 2018

The UK’s financial watchdog is seeking views on how technology could could make regulations “more efficient” while reducing regulatory burden on licensed firms.

In November last year, the (FCA) and the Bank of England held a two-week “TechSprint” event examining how technology can make regulatory reporting more accurate, efficient and consistent.

Participants successfully developed a proof-of-concept to make regulatory reporting machine-readable and executable, meaning licensed firms could map reporting requirements directly to data they hold, in turn streamlining the 500,000 regulatory returns the FCA receives yearly.

Now, the FCA is calling on the technology sector to help improve this process.

Guy Kirkwood, chief evangelist at robotics expert UiPath, said in an email to this publication: “Robotic process automation is already having a huge impact on the way that financial institutions meet regulatory requirements. These organisations have large teams dedicated to complying with a raft of regulations, much of which involves analysing large amounts of data from various business lines and systems. The growth of robotics is helping to automate manual tasks and provide higher levels of accuracy and enhanced productivity. The future development of intelligent robotics process automation may be able to further replicate human decision-making and further disrupt financial compliance.”

Submissions will be accepted until 20 June, 2018, and the FCA will then publish a feedback statement in the following months.

Christopher Woolard, the FCA’s executive director of strategy and competition, said: “Technology is a powerful shaper of financial regulation, able to make compliance simpler and more efficient. Our TechSprints bring people from across the financial services world together to share their collective knowledge to solve common problems. We look forward to working with industry participants in the coming months to drive these ideas forward."