Initiative of the year: Bank of England

In 2021, the Bank of England published its plan for transforming and modernising how it collects data from the supervised financial institutions. It made its goal succinctly clear: “Regulators get the data they need to fulfil their mission, at the lowest possible cost to industry.”

This is easier said than done. For a financial system as complicated and diverse as the UK’s, the hundreds of supervised financial firms need to submit a sea of information ranging from balance sheets to derivatives positions to foreign direct investment. Each firm submits a unique set of information based on its activities, and they need to submit them on time and error-free.

To make the process easier, the statistical reporting pages team at the BoE was tasked with revamping the central bank’s statistical reporting website in 2022. Since then, the team started conducting interviews and running surveys with the staff responsible for submitting data to the BoE. After multiple rounds of testing, the revamped website went live in May 2024.

What to report

Prior to the website’s update, firms in the UK had complained about the complexity of identifying what types of data to report. Information about the different reporting categories were scattered across the website in multiple formats.

The new site features a webpage for each reporting category. Each page includes a threshold detailing if a firm needs to submit a form for the specific category, as well as a brief instruction of what needs to be put into the form and where the relevant data can be found.

“The old website included links to multiple documents that firms would have to open in parallel,” says Jonathan Rez, head of service design at the BoE. “That means a lot of work scouring those documents to find and cross-reference information.”

Rez adds that the new layout and descriptions of the documents have greatly simplified the user experience and allowed firms to locate the information they need quickly and easily.

When to report

During the website development process, the design team learnt that firms wanted the reporting deadlines of different categories to be extracted and consolidated in one place for ease of use, adds Karen Bassett, senior manager for data collection at the BoE.

Prior to the revamp, the reporting deadlines were only visible in PDF format and had to be updated manually. The BoE’s design team came up with a solution to automate the process of populating the deadlines and ensure each deadline is simultaneously updated across the website.

Firms can now download a consolidated table of all reporting deadlines in an Excel spreadsheet. They can also view the deadlines for each month and each reporting category through a drop-down table on the website.

“Firms really value being able to see the different statistical reporting deadlines,” says Bassett. “Because not all the firms will submit the whole suite of data, and smaller firms may only submit one or two statistical returns. Now they can just focus on the returns they need to file and pull out the key information.”

Results

With simpler and clearer reporting guidelines, financial institutions have found tangible efficiency gains in terms of the time and human resources spent. Rez recalls a firm telling him that the new website has made it easier to assist financial institutions in submitting data to the BoE.

“Before the new design, onboarding new clients would take them [firm staff] five hours,” he says. “Now it takes one to two hours per client.”

He adds that the firm initially required senior staff to spend time on data reporting before the website update. Since the update, he says, more junior staff could complete the data reporting as the process became less complex, freeing up senior staff.

“It’s making them more efficient. They feel more confident that less experienced staff can do the job independently and autonomously. The number of queries they get from clients has also gone down,” Rez says.

Such efficiency gains were especially important as they were achieved without the high cost often associated with digitisation projects, says Angus Moir, head of data collection transformation at the BoE.

“Organisations often spend millions of pounds delivering complex technology initiatives – some of which results in valuable change, and some not,” Moir says. “In our case, we did not have millions of pounds and years, and we wanted to be really sure that the changes we made would be valued.”

He adds that he had asked the design team to avoid any custom development to the website during the delivery of the project. Not being distracted by the latest big things in tech, he says, had greatly lowered the cost and risk of the work.

This also means that when the team did get software developers involved, it was to deliver very targeted improvements in areas the team knew were going to deliver a lot of value to the website’s users, he says.

“If you work in innovation or change, I think it’s very easy for people to get caught up with the latest big things, whether that’s blockchain, artificial intelligence or the delivery of a big data platform,” Moir says. “But sometimes the seemingly simple things, if done well, can also be incredibly transformative.”

The Central Banking Awards 2025 were written by Christopher Jeffery, Daniel Hinge, Daniel Blackburn, Joasia Popowicz, Riley Steward, Jimmy Choi, Levente Koroes, Thomas Chow and Blake Evans-Pritchard.