Linda Middleditch - Chief Product Officer, Regnology
Driving Regnology's product vision. A year in review.
As she reaches her one-year milestone as Chief Product Officer at Regnology, Linda Middleditch unpacks the highlights of her tenure thus far and shares her vision for the future of the RegTech and SupTech industry.
You’ve been at Regnology for a full year now. What about this space excites you?
How does your current role as Chief Product Officer compare to past positions you’ve held?
I find this space fascinating for a couple of key reasons. First, I really do feel that it's the last bastion of inefficiency within the banks. The way that regulatory reporting works currently, it seems to have missed out on some of the transformations that have occurred across different technology sectors. I also think there is opportunity for not just technological innovation, but strategic innovation as well.
I spent a lot of my career within portfolio and delta one trading, and I see a lot of parallels in my current role in terms of managing, examining and presenting data. In a fast-paced trading environment, you can't possibly look at every single piece of data, so platforms must be efficient in showing you what to look for and where to look. I also think there are parallels with where I started my career, which was more within the operations and middle-office space, where the buzzword was “straight-through processing.” Looking at regulatory reporting, it’s apparent that this area was underserved by the STP movement – there’s still a “check every line” mentality, creating significant opportunity for providers that can enable a better approach.
Why is Regnology the right provider to facilitate a streamlined regulatory and supervisory process?
We are on both sides of the problem, so we are informed by perspective from both regulators and the regulated. By allowing for greater collaboration among all stakeholders, we are enabling automation and streamlined workflows. When it comes to regulation, change is the only constant, so being flexible enough to evolve with industry evolution is key. We have an extremely flexible granular data model, so we can rapidly add new data points as financial organizations change and new products are released. For example, this model enabled us to smoothly adapt to the rise of ESG requirements, earning us several awards over the past few years.
We’re also making a conscious effort to replicate best practices from other areas of financial and banking technology. Often, the strengths of an industry can stagnate over time and morph into weaknesses. SupTech is a very stable space; it’s full of veteran professionals who have been doing the same thing for a long time, so what we need is to inject a bit of different thinking, pulling together people from a variety of reporting platforms and from disparate backgrounds.
Our commitment to reflecting these diverse perspectives has put Regnology in an ideal position. One of our key priorities is greater communication between the technological and operational levels of our business, and to that end we’re moving people around internally to ensure multiple views of complex problems.
What do you believe are the most important trends in the RegTech and SupTech space right now?
Cloud enabling the RegTech space is a key trend – and that means a true data transformation, not just a lift-and-shift cloud solution. Collection volumes are steadily increasing, and with the Integrated Reporting Framework (IReF) and Basel IV set to be implemented in the EU over the next few years, greater standardization and a shift to more granular data will be key priorities. Automation is another big one, moving away from a “check everything” mode and into a “check the systems” mentality – almost a sense of putting the “tech” back in RegTech. A big part of that is bringing forward some of that validation work to an earlier stage of the workflow. Finally, we’re seeing increased focus on ESG and the integration of AI for data analytics as prominent trends as well.
Looking at regulatory reporting [...] there’s still a “check every line” mentality, creating significant opportunity for providers that can enable a better approach.
Linda Middleditch
Chief Product Officer
Regnology
Regnology boasts a wide range of clients, supporting over 7,000 financial institutions and dozens of regulators and tax authorities.
Can you tell us more about how you work to service this variety of industry players?
It comes down to establishing partnerships while making sure you have the ability to specialize where specialization is needed. We want to balance between bringing everyone together and reflecting their own unique needs as well. While our company grew out of Germany and we remain market leaders there, it’s essential that we understand regional and jurisdictional nuances and make every client feel valued as we continue to expand globally.
Because I spent so much of my career on the industry side, I’m of the belief that RegTech providers should come to the table prepared to have a full-fledged discussion with clients and prospects around potential solutions to specific challenges. Recently, we’ve had some great conversations with regulators who are interested in us helping them because we have this perspective from both sides – we can explain, for example, the difficulties that their supervisory mandates might create for the firms they regulate and explore different ways to achieve the intended result.
With regard to different perspectives, we also talk a lot about diversity these days, but quite often we focus solely on bringing somebody that looks a bit different to the table. In my opinion, the regulatory reporting space is in need of more cognitive diversity – different ways of thinking and tackling problems – to advance to the level of other industry workflows.
Can you tell us about any new product features from Regnology that are helping to shape the future of regulation and supervision?
Our job is to enable our clients on the regulated side to provide accurate data, on time and spending as few resources as possible. We focus heavily on transforming the reporting workflow within our products, eliminating as many manual steps as possible. We spent several years transforming the backend of our regulated product, and those efforts will be completed this year. Now, we can build on that great foundation to transform the workflows that sit above that product as well.
We'll soon be launching a new UI to create a better experience and add value for our clients. On the SupTech side, we can leverage similar tools. It really is about taking a step back from the reporting chain and using new tools and technology available to us to help both regulators and the regulated achieve more while expending less.
Discover the Regnology platform and solutions
A unified approach to address increasing regulatory complexity and higher data quality requirements.
Delivering a platform that streamlines the workflows of regulators and the regulated with a common user interface that enables the sharing of services and data and enhances communication.
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