As financial regulators the world over accelerate their investment in digital transformation, financial supervision software has become a topic of considerable interest. Supervisory Technology or SupTech allows central banks and other financial regulators to spend more time on supervisory activities and less time on data processing. 

It does so by designing, creating, and testing solutions using emerging technologies like AI and machine-to-machine reporting. Here, we look at three financial authorities in Australia, Africa and North America who have revolutionised their operations using our supervisory data collection solutions. 

Increased manpower has been used as part of the solution, but, while data metrics continue to grow, central banks can’t continue hiring people to manage it manually. Technology holds the key to managing these data challenges for central banks.

How Australian pension funds use financial supervision software 

In Australia, all employers are obliged to pay into pension funds for their employees, which is known as superannuation. These funds are regulated by Australia’s financial regulator APRA. Different employers use different fund managers, and that can make them difficult to compare and scrutinise. 

The APRA Superannuation Data Transformation project, known as APRA Connect, aims to drive best practices within the industry, and improve outcomes for its members by enhancing the consistency of reported data. 

In April 2019, the Vizor Suptech Platform was selected by APRA as the software platform of choice. It’s the first solution to automatically synchronise with all APRA data models and rules published on the new APRA Connect.  

This eliminates complex system upgrades and reduces the cost and impact of future regulatory changes for superannuation. The key benefits include automatic system updates in sync with APRA Connect templates and rules; pre-validation of your APRA Connect data to guarantee “right-first-time” submission. 

It is a cost-effective solution since it eliminates manual effort by automatically converting your excel data to an APRA-ready submission file. It is fast and scalable, and integration with existing systems using RESTful APIs is straightforward. 

Ghana: How ORASS is improving regulatory reporting for financial institutions 

Before they implemented our regulatory supervision software, the Bank of Ghana’s data collection systems involved 42 returns from various departments with over 250 forms and over 400 validation rules. Many of the forms were processed on paper rather than digitally. The result was painfully tedious and slow, inefficient, and often rife with errors. 

The Bank of Ghana awarded a contract to implement a fully integrated financial surveillance system. The solution provides a single portal to collect prudential data from banks and deposit-taking institutions and manage the review and approval of license and authorisation requests from reporting entities.  

The solution, called ORASS (Online Regulatory and Analytical Surveillance Software) by Bank of Ghana, enables the regulator to consolidate and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the data they are collecting as well as the consistency across the departments. Regulated bodies can submit their data automatically via our API, reducing the number of human interactions and errors.  

As a result, the Bank of Ghana has seen significantly improved quality, consistency, reliability, and integrity of data submitted to and published by the Central Bank. The Bank can now provide supervisors with insightful surveillance reports immediately, along with business intelligence reports from the data warehouse. 

The regulator benefits from enhanced monitoring and supervision on both a standalone and consolidated basis to quickly identify inherent risks within the financial system, and can now proactively determine supervisory, regulatory and policy decisions or actions required. 

Since it implemented the Vizor Suptech Platform, the Bank of Ghana has seen significant decreases in the time and cost required to implement new regulatory requirements over time through our self-service tool. 

Modernising with supervisory data collection solutions in North America 

After more than 30 years, three federal North American organisations, including the Central Bank and the supervisor of financial institutions, were keen to bring their regulatory and supervisory systems up to date and online. 

The goal was to create a single supervision system for the reporting of financial and corporate returns via an online portal. To fulfil their ambitions, the organisations needed a solution to migrate 470,000 filed returns dating back to the 1960s and to incorporate 340,000 rules from a wide range of systems.  

In partnership with Deloitte, we were appointed to develop an online portal, regulatory supervision software known as RRS (Regulatory Reporting System) for use by all the reporting entities. The system consists of more than 100 separate returns with their data models and sets of validation rules. 

The software allows for the implementation of complex return scheduling for periodic submissions, such as fiscal year-end. This provided submission tracking, overdue submission reporting and submission history. The RSS uses an embedded workflow for data entry, validation, submission, review and approval and iterative correction and revision cycles. 

The project was successful. RSS went live ahead of schedule and on budget. It achieved significant reductions in data processing times and replaced multiple older systems with a single supervision platform based wholly on the Vizor SupTech Platform. 

We work extremely closely with financial authorities to create bespoke SupTech solutions. Implementing a robust supervisory data collection solution results in faster, better quality data with less need for human intervention in the process. That means financial regulators are free to supervise with quality data they trust, while technology takes care of the grunt work such as scrubbing the data.

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