The FCA and the PRA have issued a joint Dear CEO letter providing a progress report on the Bank of England’s plans for transforming data collection in the UK financial services sector – and asking firms for their support.
Transforming Data Collection from the UK Financial Sector: A Plan for 2021 and beyond sets out the Banks’s plans for transforming its ability to collect data and together with the FCA and PRA.
The plan identifies three critical areas of reform:
- Integrating reporting: increasing consistency in designing and delivering collections for value, re-use and efficiency
- Modernising reporting instructions: rethinking the way reporting requirements are designed and expressed and improving the ease with which they can be interpreted and implemented by firms
- Defining and adopting common data standards: standardising how financial data is described, defined and sourced at an operational level within firms.
In laying the groundwork for its proposed data collection transformation, the Bank has identified three key challenges:
- How can the Bank ensure that its data collections are worthwhile and valuable exercises for regulators and industry to invest in?
- How can the industry best understand and interpret the Bank’s reporting instructions so that high quality data is provided?
- How can the Bank and the industry remove legacy data, process and technology siloes and streamline the reporting process?
The FCA and PRA are now asking firms to work with them in partnership to tackle these and other challenges.
‘We recognise that reporting is one of the most demanding parts of regulation,’ the letter says. ‘At the same time, the quality of data we have received has not always been to the standards we expect, and our data needs have evolved as technology and business models have changed.’
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