Data Management Provider for Regulatory Compliance: Novabase

In 2015, the European Central Bank (ECB) launched its Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (Bird), a project intended to organise the data it gathers from European Union financial institutions. The initiative came as a response to increasingly complex regulation. 

Bird provides a clear and formal definition of what a regulatory report is from the perspective of inputs, outputs and data transformation. As a result, the ECB expects to standardise and integrate statistical frameworks, increase reporting efficiency and reduce the burden for banks, while maintaining high-quality data for supervision purposes. 

Financial institutions are being asked to supply more granular data at much higher frequencies than ever before. And, while central banks are creating software to help them decipher the data they receive, firms still face challenges in dealing with data from multiple sources and the high cost of reporting due to outdated infrastructure. 

Looking to bridge this gap is Novabase and its Symetria, a product developed to help financial institutions address current and future regulatory reporting requirements. Symetria integrates with data sources, which allows financial institutions to provide timely and transparent information to regulators across multiple jurisdictions. It is also the first commercially available platform to support automatic Bird conversion for all disclosed regulations, the firm says. 

“Definitions for Bird datasets and transformations are automatically translated onto our regulation engine semantic layer, allowing for ‘day zero’ execution of data pipelines for regulatory report with data audit trail capabilities,” says João Carlos Simões, head of product for Symetria. 

Since launching, 16 Portuguese institutions have chosen Symetria as a reporting tool for the Bank of Portugal’s new Central Credit Register. To meet the demands of AnaCredit – a new database with detailed individual information on eurozone bank loans in line with functional criteria laid out by the ECB – Symetria manages and monitors the entire consolidation process for information that must be reported to the Portuguese central bank. 

Furthermore, as technology continues to develop, Novabase has adapted Symetria to feature artificial intelligence, the use of which allows automatic detection of anomalies. The platform identifies potential errors, duplications or other anomalies with a data validation rules engine that integrates with each regulatory model. 

“The new version of Symetria includes multi-regulation and multi-geography support, which means that it easily adapts to different reporting requirements around the world,” says Afonso Mota, executive director at Novabase. 

“Symetria now integrates a centralised regulatory reporting schedule management, which enables teams to proactively manage risk by anticipating tasks. It also allows to synchronise reporting cycles with different regulations and their interdependencies,” he adds. 

Read the full Central Banking FinTech & RegTech Global Awards 2019 Winners In Focus report