Regulatory Reporting Quality is a Top Priority for 85% of Firms

What does the future of Regulatory Reporting look like? Following a period of immense change and a range of upcoming regulatory reporting deadlines, many people are asking this very question. It is certainly a topic that we have been interested in given the market changes we have seen over the past 12-18 months.

The Covid-19 pandemic has challenged almost all industries – forcing most firms to rethink how business is carried out. The financial services industry has been particularly impacted due to the strict rules and regulations that govern how regulated firms must operate. Many of the rules made it challenging for financial firms to adjust to a remote environment.

If this wasn’t challenging enough for regulated entities, two significant regulatory reporting vendors exited the market last year, the UK left the European Union – increasing complexity for players in both regions, and there are a range of upcoming changes to regulatory reporting under both EMIR and MiFIR that firms need to get to grips with.

Because of these past and future changes, complying with regulatory reporting rules has become more challenging. At the same time, European regulators have increased their enforcement action – switching their focus from embedding regulations like MiFID II to enforcing them – as evidenced by the fact that penalties linked to breaches of MiFID II regulatory reporting requirements more than quadrupled in 2020. Firms therefore need to improve their reporting quality while also adjusting to the increased challenges of the changing regulatory reporting landscape. 

Given these intense pressures, we facilitated a webinar discussion between reporting experts Dario Crispini from Kaizen Reporting, Bernardo Castel-Branco from Alpha FMC, and Matt Smith from SteelEye to discuss how the changes are shaping the reporting market and what firms should be doing to improve their regulatory reporting in the long-term.

The webinar hosted over seventy Heads of Compliance and Compliance Officers, Heads of Reporting, Regulatory Reporting Managers, Operating Officers and more. During the webinar, we took the opportunity to ask the attendees from both the buy and sell-side a number of key questions.  The results were highly insightful and have contributed to our report on the Future of Regulatory Reporting which combines the results from the polls with analysis from the experts. 

You can download the report here.

Key highlights from the Regulatory Reporting report: 

• 69% of people deem regulatory reporting under MiFIR to be more complex to manage than EMIR reporting

• 30% of firms do not have the technology they need in place for the EMIR Refit

• 85% of people rate regulatory reporting quality as their top priority for the next 12-months

• 44% of firms are considering the adoption of a single solution for EMIR and MiFIR regulatory reporting

Key advice from the experts on the future of regulatory reporting: 

• “It is important that firms view regulatory reporting not as an end-product but as a continuous process that requires constant feedback”
  Dario Crispini, CEO of Kaizen Reporting

• “As with a lot of regulatory regimes, an approach based on a single data strategy is a key ingredient to effective and future-proofed compliance.”
  Bernardo Castel-Branco, Associate Director of Alpha FMC

• “The future of regulatory reporting is going to be about reducing complexity, cost, and the number of vendors and solutions firms are using, while at the same time becoming more efficient.”
  Matt Smith, CEO of SteelEye