As regulators focus more on risk data aggregation, bankers would be well advised to devote more time and resources to RegTech and other next-generation systems. That’s according to a new white paper by Wolters Kluwer’s Finance, Risk & Reporting business.

RegTech is devoted exclusively to compliance and related issues, such as risk analysis and management. One promising feature of the technology is that it should be able to work with existing systems since RegTech tends to be heavier on software than hardware. Such systems should keep institutions ahead of the game by allowing them to keep track of, and adjust to, new rules as soon as they are implemented, the white paper argues.

Many banks currently have a number of loosely connected systems, each handling a limited portion of data-processing and compliance needs. Some state-of-the-art RegTech solutions could, however, allow

firms to enhance these legacy systems so that they can process and organize data of different types in different ways. This gives systems greater agility and flexibility, permitting data to be analyzed and reports to be prepared more quickly for supervisory bodies imposing requirements under many sets of rules and standards.

“The ability to handle much more information much more quickly, and to improvise as urgent, out-of-the-blue requests and unanticipated changes to supervisory frameworks are made, is a hallmark of the technological solutions being developed,” comments Richard Reeves, vice president of Strategy for OneSumX at Wolters Kluwer and author of the report. “It’s a key reason that RegTech systems are being embraced by banks and regulators alike and are occupying an expanding segment of the broader FinTech universe. It marks a significant departure from how banks have typically organized themselves as collections of mostly autonomous operating units, so-called silos, rather than as single, cohesive entities.”

Reeves adds that banks are looking for powerful ways to leverage increasing amounts of data and to improve ROI on existing infrastructure. In fact, banks are increasingly looking to deploy systems which allow for powerful analysis in seconds and minutes, rather than days and weeks, through the combination of bottom-up and top down models and full exploitation of the rich underlying data, which can support extensive interpolation and sensitivity analysis. “The use of these top-down ‘challenger-style’ models not only enables sanity checking of bottom-up results, but allows for the speed of response,” Reeves notes. “Having this ability will better equip organizations to quickly plot a course to navigate around financial storms before they hit, rather than measure their effect in detail after they have wreaked their havoc.”

While regulatory innovation may be the catalyst driving innovation in technology and in banking generally, the benefits derived will extend well beyond placating financial watchdogs, the report notes.

In fact, that is the message being driven home by supervisors themselves. They continue to assure banks that while the cost in time and money for data systems may be high, so will be the commercial rewards. This is because such systems will help foster a more comprehensive, forward looking approach to the way banks are able to manage their businesses and especially their risk.

Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) is a division of Wolters Kluwer which provides legal, finance, risk and compliance professionals and small business owners with a broad spectrum of solutions, services and expertise needed to help manage myriad governance, risk and compliance needs in dynamic markets and regulatory environments. The division’s prominent brands include: AuthenticWeb™, Bankers Systems®, BizFilings®, Capital Changes, CASH Suite™, CT Corporation, CT Lien Solutions, ComplianceOne®, Corsearch, Expere®, GainsKeeper®, LegalVIEW®, OneSumX®, Passport®, TyMetrix® 360, Uniform Forms™, VMP® Mortgage Solutions and Wiz®.

Wolters Kluwer N.V. (AEX: WKL) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. Wolters Kluwer reported 2015 annual revenues of €4.2 billion. The company, headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands, serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries and employs 19,000 people worldwide.