FCA considers hired help for data mountain

The Financial Conduct Authority is considering employing external providers to help it handle the sizeable and complex data sets it receives.

The Financial Conduct Authority is considering employing external providers to help it handle the sizeable and complex data sets it receives.

William Amos, director of wholesale banking and investment management at the FCA, told this year’s TSAM Europe Congress in London that the regulator is reviewing how it handles large data sets.

He explained: “One of the things we are looking at are ways that we can process data with systems rather than relying on people, and whether there are external providers that can provide that at a cheaper cost.”

Amos said he hoped the move would increase transparency and remove inconsistencies which the regulator has sometimes witnessed citing its recent review of costs and charges as an example.

The announcement came on the same day that SWIFT released a white paper entitled: “Operational Challenges Facing Investment Managers in 2015” which highlighted data reporting as one of the biggest concerns for asset managers.

It stated: “The data that has to be retrieved to populate regulatory reports is voluminous and has to be validated and often reformatted.”

One of the un-named buy-side respondents to the SWIFT white paper said: “We have got a lot of data and we need less.  We have got 12,500 unique assets, which translates into about 55,000 holdings. We are talking in total of about 8,000 bank accounts.”

The FCA director’s announcement follows previously announced plans at the end of last year to update the regulators data strategy.

In October, the regulator said it was looking to ‘adapt’ its data reporting requirements, but this is the first time the use of “external providers” has been suggested publically.

The FCA has already said it will be ‘rolling out a new way of handling data’ submissions in 2015, although no further details have, as yet, been released.

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