Bank of England transforming data collection

The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) gave the bank the responsibility for the prudential regulation and supervision of 1,700 banks, building societies, credit unions, insurers, and major investment firms in the UK. Each of these entities submits a significant volume of data as part of the supervisory process.  

Naturally, ensuring the quality of the data is key to success. Beju Shah, Domain Lead – Data Collection & Publication at Bank of England says on a podcast discussing intelligent automation with Seth Adler, "How do you get confidence in the results if you haven't got the right plumbing or data in place?" 

The Challenge

The Bank of England had to establish a system for insurers to provide regulatory data returns under the SII Directive to the PRA. The SII introduced capital requirements sensitive to the levels of risk being undertaken and provided appropriate incentives for good risk management. 

The returns, provided electronically on a quarterly and annual basis, were to be used to assess the solvency position of insurers and provide the information to support the Supervisory Review Process. 

The bank wanted to be able to expand the system to add new data models, collections, and processes for other industry sectors, such as banking and credit unions. 

The Solution

The Bank of England Electronic Data Submission (BEEDS) system used the Vizor SupTech Platform to meet the EU deadline for the first phase of the SII regime in June 2015. The project was on time and on budget. 

The bank added the system to several other data collections, including Buy-to-Let, Capital+, and Credit Unions. With our assistance, the bank was able to take the leading role in the configuration and roll-out of many of these additional data collections. 

Building on the success, we won a larger contract in 2018 to develop the bank's strategic data collection platform. Several older systems were replaced, and data collections were consolidated in the new platform.

This involved creating a single supervision system for the reporting of financial and corporate returns via an online portal. To fulfil its ambitions, the Central Bank needed to migrate 470,000 filed returns dating back to the 1960s and 340,000 rules from a wide range of systems.

The Benefits

• The Bank of England was able to achieve many important benefits and improvements using our software. 
• Move to a self-service model with minimal oversight and assistance. 
• Implement its own data collections and supervisory processes using online forms, Excel, XML and XBRL.  
• Quickly add new data collections and regulatory requirements at a reduced cost. 
• Deploy ad hoc collections and incorporate extra functionality when needed with minimal assistance. 
• Implement a platform for more than 2,000 external file users from over 600 financial institutions across the UK. 
• Meet all EU mandated deadlines on time and on budget. 
• Provide data uploading, processing and sharing of data and information. 
• Ensure comprehensive data validation at multiple levels (field, form, cross-form, cross-return, cross-period, plausibility). 
• Develop workflows for managing the processing and reviewing of data. 
• Set plausibility rules with processes for financial institutions to provide explanations of rule failures. 
• Provide advanced user management, authentication and permissions modelling. 
• Replace older systems and consolidate their data collections in the new platform. 

Are you interested in hearing more about our supervisory solutions? Talk to our experts by booking a demo.