This utility has recently been awarded a prize by a cross-industry panel of judges at a recent FCA event for providing a solution which has the biggest potential to move the UK regulatory market forward. In fact, such a utility has already been successfully implemented in Austria, generating huge interest from banks and regulators across the globe and achieving saving across the country upward of 30%.

With ever increasing investment required for banks to meet the rapidly changing regulatory environment, change is eagerly sought to ease this increasing strain on resource.

For each regulatory change, firms go through the same process of seeking external interpretation, carrying out internal analysis, and then sourcing and processing data through their individual data models and systems, before compiling reports into templates to send to the regulator. This process occurs on a local, regional, and global basis, with compliance required in all areas.

BearingPoint has developed a solution to address these industry issues; UKRep. Using BearingPoint’s Abacus360 platform as its basis, UKRep has been designed to industrialise the entire process by providing a single industry utility. Furthermore, not only does this solution relieve the pressures for each individual bank, it has the potential to bring the banking industry together through an industry wide shared service platform, allowing for huge economies of scale to be achieved.

How it works

UKRep works as the central interface between the banks and the financial regulators, using BearingPoint’s award winning software platform - Abacus360 - at its core. This solution replaces the template-based reporting method with an “input-based approach” based on data cubes. Banks deliver micro data on the level of single contracts or deals like loans, deposits and securities in the form of so-called “basic cubes” to Abacus360. These basic cubes are enriched by additional attributes and then the required reports are generated in form of multi-dimensional data cubes, the so-called “smart cubes”. Smart Cubes are finally analysed, signed off and remitted to the regulator. Based on the Abacus360 platform, UKRep is able to deal with growing regulatory demands in fully industrialised fashion including handling regulatory ad-hoc requests from the regulators.

Maciej Piechocki, Partner at BearingPoint says; ‘The adoption of RegTech within the banking industry has the potential to significantly change the way in which banks, and regulators work together - something which can be viewed as inherently static due to these very regulations hindering change or innovation. UKRep has been designed to allow the industry to radically change the way in which it operates; benefitting from huge efficiency gains and allows the cost of regulatory reporting to be shared across the entire industry.’

This innovative solution has already been successfully implemented in Austria, where the largest Austrian banking groups have come together to form the world’s largest regulatory reporting service company, processing over 1.4 billion records each reporting date.

As an outcome, Austria has seen a decrease in the cost of regulatory reporting across the entire country by upwards of 30%, with expectations for this to significantly increase. It has also dramatically reduced the systematic risk exposed to banks by these changes in regulation.

Introducing the use of semantic technology, UKRep builds upon the solution as seen in Austria and allows the platform to not only address the dissemination of regulation, but it links regulatory systems and data, allowing banks to rapidly respond to change.

UKRep is truly regulatory reporting as a service, and has the scale and potential to change the regulatory reporting environment on a global scale.