FCA, Bank of England propose data reforms across the UK financial sector

The FCA’s refreshed Data Strategy sets out a transformation plan to become a highly data-driven regulator. The organisation aims to focus on the use of advanced analytics and automation techniques to deepen its understanding of how markets function to allow the FCA to efficiently predict, monitor, and respond to firm and market issues.

Furthermore, the FCA will pursue a broader transformation, investing in skills and new ways of working to enable it to better understand and use data and innovative technology. The approach includes data science units being established in selected parts of the organisation and exploitation of new opportunities arising from the FCA’s migration to cloud-based IT infrastructure.

The Bank of England has published a Discussion Paper (DP), Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector, to improve the timeliness and effectiveness of data collection from companies across the financial system. The DP sets out the issues facing the current data collection system and identifies and explores a series of potential solutions, to prompt feedback from and further discussion with industry.

In addition, the FCA, the Bank of England and seven regulated firms have jointly published a Viability Assessment report on the latest Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR) pilot. DRR will potentially allow firms to automatically supply data requested by the regulators, thereby reducing the cost of collection, improving data quality and reducing the burden of data supply on the industry.