As financial reporting requirements evolve, banks face mounting pressure to not just report accurately, but prove how reports are built. Ed Kennedy says that collaboration, transparency, and lateral thinking are critical for navigating growing regulatory
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The days of being able to satisfy regulation and compliance
processes by getting a report out are now in the long-distant past. Financial
institutions are learning that regulators no longer care simply about the
accuracy of what’s reported – they care about how it comes together.
That shift is
raising the stakes for banks already contending with legacy systems, complex
data flows, and inconsistent collaboration across functions.
“The landscape
that banks are operating in has changed dramatically,” said Ed Kennedy, who
works with more than 500 banks globally in his role as Financial Services
Solution Owner with Workiva. “Efficiency, transparency, and agility are now the
cornerstones of modern financial reporting.”
While getting reports done and submitted accurately and on
time is all well and good, the question regulators are increasingly asking is:
how did you arrive at these numbers?
That process –
from data collection to final sign-off – needs to be documented, tested, and
explainable. As Kennedy put it, “Those regulators are now starting to pay a lot
more attention to how you are producing this stuff.”
This focus on process integrity is happening against a
backdrop of continuous regulatory churn. From capital adequacy to liquidity
risk to stress testing frameworks, the rulebooks are complex – and they sit on
shifting sands that are constantly moving underfoot.
Legal and risk
professionals at major banks describe an ongoing struggle to interpret loosely
defined instructions.
These often
originate not from statutory law but from guidance and public notices that
create an ambiguity that serves to magnify the pressure on reporting teams to
ensure both precision and defensibility.
Kennedy emphasizes the fact that this creates a unique
challenge for risk managers. “Standing up huge projects to adapt to new
requirements means that engineering for a high degree of operational agility
actually[1] [2]
starts to feature quite highly on the things that our customers are seeking,”
he says.
In short, the
ability to pivot – quickly and cleanly – has become a competitive necessity.
In a recent webinar in which Kenndey was a panellist, one
senior risk executive noted that the core struggles of regulatory reporting
fall into three primary areas: compliance, accuracy, and timeliness.
On the surface of things, these are simple to describe, but
tough to achieve, especially when data is fragmented across systems, teams, and
functions. Many institutions still rely on manual processes, desktop tools, and
siloed datasets. The result is inefficiency, opacity, and risk.
