A consortium of five global banks, including Barclays, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs and HSBC have formed a joint venture company to create a Position Reporting Utility for reporting securities holdings to regulatory bodies.
Dubbed Endoxa, the aim of the newly-established utility is to improve the quality of regulatory disclosures and mitigate interpretation and implementation errors through machine readable rule logic established through a consensus model.
Covering complex shareholder disclosure obligations across key regulatory jurisdictions, Endoxa will attempt to reach consensus views on interpretative aspects of the disclosure rules. This will be combined with legal interpretation provided by Allen & Overy, alongside the standardised legal analysis contained in Rulefinder Shareholding Disclosure from aosphere LLP.
"Creating this consortium will enable us as financial institutions to more effectively and efficiently navigate the regulatory complexity of the global Position Reporting rules while retaining each firm's ownership of the underlying risks," says Richard Hempsell, global head of core operations at Goldman Sachs. "The platform will drive unified standards and support transparent, consistent compliance across the industry."
The consortium has chosen regulatory reporting firm Droit as the technology partner for the project. Founded in 2012, Droit's patented platform Adept provides an implementation of regulatory rules reflecting industry consensus. Adept has the ability to automate the decision-making process and delivers a traceable audit record of every position evaluated for both sell-side and buy-side institutions.
Brock Arnason, founder and CEO of Droit, says: "The formation of this unique consortium, whose members include some of the largest and most sophisticated global financial institutions, provides a revolutionary approach to regulatory compliance. We believe this partnership can be extended to many issues the industry is facing."