What is Regulatory Reporting?
So, regulatory reporting is basically the process where financial institutions regularly send reports to supervisory authorities, like the European Central Bank or the European Banking Authority.
These reports include key information that helps regulators make sure the institution is managing its risks correctly, following the rules, and staying generally stable and healthy.
It’s super important because it helps keep not just individual banks safe, but the entire financial system. It also plays a big role in preventing major crises, like the one we saw in 2008. And at the end of the day, it’s really about protecting customers and investors.
What role does technology, and in particular, data, play in ensuring effective regulatory compliance today?
Data is at the core of regulatory reporting. It’s all about accurate, complete, and consistent information, like loan details. This is key to meeting regulator demands and avoiding fines or reputational damage. With the shift to granular data, its importance will only grow.
Technology plays a vital role by automating the whole process: from data collection and validation to report generation. Without it, especially for big banks, compliance would be nearly impossible. Automation also cuts errors, improves efficiency, and helps deliver reports on time.
As Head of Product Management for Reporting & Risk, can you tell us more about your role and main responsibilities?
My main role is to work with my team to identify the key problems our clients are facing and make sure we build solutions that truly solve them.
I also define the product strategy: setting the long-term vision, prioritizing features, and ensuring we stay aligned with SBS’s overall direction.
And finally, I coordinate with teams across the company, like sales and marketing for go-to-market, and engineering for product development, to keep everything running smoothly.
What kind of challenges do your clients face?
That’s a great question. Most of the time, the challenge starts with a new regulation introduced by the authorities. Our clients need to respond to these new requirements by producing updated regulatory reports and that’s where we come in. We help them get ready, ensure the reports are accurate, and make sure the underlying data is solid and reliable.
Major regulatory reporting reforms are expected to reshape the financial sector in the European Union by 2026. What are the main changes being introduced?
One big reform to watch is the Integrated Reporting Framework, or IReF. It was planned for 2026 but now pushed to 2029, and it’ll bring major changes. The main idea is to merge several reports into one unified report and completely change how data is reported.
Right now, banks fill out templates like Excel sheets with aggregated numbers, like total loans. With IReF, they’ll have to submit detailed, granular data on each loan, including amounts, borrower location, and more. Supervisors will work directly with this detailed data, which is a big shift in regulatory reporting.
What is the overall objective behind this reform?
The main goal is to reduce the regulatory burden for both banks and supervisors.
This will happen mainly by harmonizing and merging several reporting frameworks into one. That helps cut down on duplication and inconsistencies, making the whole reporting process more efficient.
Banks will save time and resources because instead of producing 6 or 7 separate reports, they’ll only need to produce one.
It also means fewer tools, if banks used multiple systems before, they’ll now only need one. Plus, since requirements are combined, banks extract the data just once instead of multiple times for different reports.
While reforms can sometimes feel like a burden, what opportunities do they offer to banks and financial institutions?
I actually believe these reforms, especially IReF, bring some real opportunities.
For starters, it’s a chance to modernize and simplify reporting tools, cutting down on outdated systems and moving to future-proof solutions that can better handle ongoing regulatory changes. That means better efficiency and lower costs.
Also, moving from aggregated reports to granular data means banks will have access to much more detailed information. While they have to share this data with regulators, they can also use it internally, for better reporting, deeper business insights, smarter decision-making, and even AI-driven analysis.
So, while it’s a challenge, it’s also an opportunity to improve how banks work with their data.
How is SBS helping its clients prepare for these upcoming regulatory changes?
The short answer is our new solution, SBP Regulatory Reporting (SBP RR). It’s a cutting-edge SaaS product designed to help our clients tackle upcoming regulatory changes with confidence.
By using the latest technologies and the power of the cloud, SBP RR delivers much better performance compared to older systems, something that’s crucial given the expected increase in data volumes, especially with IReF.
What sets SBP RR apart is its data approach. Clients can collect regulatory data once and use it across multiple requirements, all in one solution.
It also includes a common data model and strong data quality features, helping clients ensure accurate reports and smoothly adapt to new regulations.
Would you like to join the SBS (ex-Sopra Banking Software) adventure? Discover all our job offers on our Careers page by clicking on this link.
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