Technology services – regulatory: Regnology

The digitalisation of the global economy has been under way for some time now, but the Covid-19 pandemic added to the pressure to go digital. Financial institutions are making greater use of data in their business, and regulators need increasingly granular data to stay on top of the risks. For many, legacy systems were not designed to handle the sort of volumes or complexity of data that is a fact of the modern economy. Central banks and regulators worldwide are now seeking to upgrade their technology, often in collaboration with industry.

A firm well placed to support both public and private institutions in this endeavour is Regnology. Formed in 2021 from the merger of Vizor Software and BearingPoint Software Solutions’ regulatory technology business, the firm has proven supervisory technology to offer supervisors, as well as deep knowledge of regtech – systems built to help firms manage their reporting requirements.

In the past year, Regnology has undertaken projects for central banks and regulators including Sweden’s Finansinspektionen (FI), the National Bank of Romania, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (Apra) and the South African Reserve Bank’s Prudential Authority (PA).

Regnology’s Abacus Regulator has long been a core part of the business, offering regulators a platform for every aspect of regulatory data collection, from submissions to data validation and visualisation, and onward reporting to the European supervisory authorities. In the past few years, Regnology has overhauled the product, which started life as a redeveloped version of a platform for commercial banks. The firm has now completely rebuilt it for regulators and taken it fully cloud-native in the process.

The first regulator to adopt the new version – Regulator 3 – was Sweden’s FI. Benjamin Printz, a data warehouse architect at FI, says Regnology won the contract after going through Sweden’s “arduous” public procurement process. Even though the regulator did not specifically request the technology, FI found the containerisation in Regnology’s project to be a particular benefit – and one that was not offered by other vendors.

A software container packages up all the code needed for an application so it can run on any computing environment, whether that is a local server or in the cloud. The data is stored in a separate data lake, and supervisors can quickly create new containers to work with the data. For additional processing power, multiple containers can run side by side.

Another key development, particularly in Europe, has been what Regnology calls “regulation as a service”. Regnology rolls out upgrades of the regulatory logic to its customers’ systems every time European authorities implement new regulations. Users of the system can configure everything to their own needs. But upgrades also work straight ‘out of the box’, minimising the need for manual intervention.

Regnology completed the process of installing Regulator 3 at FI in 2021, and the regulator is now in the process of migrating to the new platform. The National Bank of Romania, which was an early adopter of Regulator back in 2008, also upgraded to the new generation and opted for regulation as a service.

Robert Binder, product director at Regnology, says a key benefit is the platform model, which “harmonises all regulatory reporting in one solution”. “Also, Regnology’s regulation-as-a-service is no black box,” he adds. “Regulators can look at everything that’s inside, for example, to change or add validation rules.”

Major clients for Vizor in the past year include Apra and South Africa’s PA. The Apra project began in 2019, and went live for the superannuation and banking sectors in the past year. It is now being rolled out to cover the financial sector more broadly.

“A key element is the self-service approach to data management,” says Joanne Horgan, suptech product director with Regnology. The system automates a lot of the data collection process, allowing supervisors on the business side to translate their Excel specifications straight into the data model and the templates that can be used for reporting. That reduces the need for IT specialists to ‘tinker’ with the system every time supervisors want to define new data requests. Clients say this a major benefit of Abacus, as well.

The project, as part of the PA Transformation Programme, is helping the South African regulator gain a “360-degree view” of institutions from authorisation through to prudential reporting and ongoing risk-based supervision, says Horgan: “The ability to manage all types of data collection and supervisory workflows in one platform is quite unique. It brings benefits in terms of efficiency and the quality of data you can collect. Supervisors gain a clear single view of all industries under supervision.”

Regnology is looking ahead to the inevitable continued digitalisation in the years ahead. The two solutions will now grow together into a fully harmonised, cloud-optimised data collection solution under the Vizor SupTech brand. The firm is also focusing on boosting the ease of integration. The use of application programming interfaces could help ensure that the systems that supervisors use for data collection and those operated by firms for regulatory reporting can more easily interface with one another.

Demands for data by supervisors are surely only going to increase in the years ahead. Regnology has proven its position as a trusted partner as firms and regulators navigate this changing environment.