In a financial services industry that moves millions in milliseconds, it’s sobering to realize that the regulatory reporting processes underpinning these markets remain stuck in the past. Despite advances in technology and regulatory data management, regulatory reporting operates primarily on what Maciej Piechocki, Chief Revenue Officer at RegTech and SupTech provider Regnology, calls “digitalized paper.”
“If you think about regulatory reporting, it’s typically a bank creating digitalized paper and putting this into a regulators digital mailbox. Then the regulator is reading the digitalized paper—it’s massively inefficient”, he tells RegTech Insight.
It’s a problem that affects both regulated firms and regulators, leading to systemic inefficiencies and missed risks. And as the pace and complexity of regulation continue to increase globally, there’s a growing need to rethink the entire regulatory reporting workflow from first principles.
A Process Stuck in the 1970s
Although technology has transformed many areas of financial services—trading, payments, risk management, regulatory reporting has lagged behind. The steady pace of automation has reduced the ratio of people to technology to roughly 20% people/80% technology across these core functions. With regulatory reporting, this ratio is reversed with 80% of the effort coming from people, fuelled in large part by the need for specialised—and expensive—regulatory experts with deep knowledge of the obligations expected in local market segments and supervisory jurisdictions. Piechocki notes that “Regulators are facing the same challenge.”
Financial institutions are facing a rapidly evolving landscape. Even when the political agenda leans toward deregulation, the regulatory change management process still puts considerable demands on compliance resources.
Straight-Through Reporting (STR) – the Future of Regulatory Data
Mireille Adebiyi, Chief Marketing Officer at Regnology describes the aspiration to “Not have regulatory reporting be this cumbersome, manually heavy exercise where you allocate expert resources to produce the report, but rather a model that seeks to emulate the seamlessness of straight-through processing (STP) in capital markets applied to regulatory data flows i.e. straight through reporting (STR).”
Such a model would not only improve efficiency but dramatically reduce the latency of information—a critical factor in preventing crises like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), where regulators lacked real-time insight into deteriorating balance sheets. The evidence was there, but it was buried in digitalized paper.
Breaking the 20th-Century Mindset
Piechocki argues that part of the problem is the persistence of a “paper-based mentality” within regulatory reporting processes. Even as documents and forms have moved to digital formats, the underlying logic of reporting has remained unchanged—batch-based, static, and backwards-looking. The result is a system designed to replicate formerly manual processes rather than serve as a meaningful tool for systemic risk monitoring. “It’s still operating a paper-based mentality. And you’ve got to break that mentality,” he says.
This inversion of the people-to-technology ratio is a significant drag on efficiency, and more importantly, on regulators’ ability to identify emerging risks in time to act.
As noted in the SVB case, regulators could not act on risks they couldn’t see clearly. While advances like Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) have improved transparency, the fundamental challenge of accessing usable, timely data still remains.
What Needs to Change?
Part of Regnology’s approach involves rethinking how data moves between firms and regulators—shifting from “push” models, where firms submit reports, to “pull” models, where regulators access live data directly under controlled governance.
As Piechocki explains, in some markets, banks and regulators are already on the same cloud infrastructure: “We have hundreds of banks in the data centre and the regulator is in the same data centre. In that case, the regulatory reporting process becomes a joke because you are transferring data from a rack to another rack in exactly the same room.”
A New Way Forward: Granularity and Real-Time Insight
Regnology sees the future of regulatory reporting in granular, real-time data exchange—something it’s actively working toward.
“With a lot of regulators, we are going fully granular,” says Piechocki. But he’s quick to emphasize that this isn’t about overwhelming regulators with raw data. “I’m not saying that regulators should see everything, instead, it’s about having the capability to zoom in on specific issues, counterparties, or exposures as necessary and without being limited by the confines of digitalized paper.”
If there’s a unifying thread to Regnology’s thinking, it’s the recognition that regulatory reporting processes need to catch up to the modern, real-time world of financial markets.
And perhaps, it’s time for the entire industry to admit that digitalized paper is no longer fit for purpose. As Piechocki puts it: “That’s why this workflow needs to go granular, to kill digitalized paper.”
The vision is clear: a future where regulators are no longer looking at weeks-old snapshots, but accessing live, actionable insights. A future where regulatory reporting is no longer a compliance bottleneck, but an integrated, streamlined process—built for the realities of today’s financial system.
Regnology’s vision is backed by a rapidly expanding global footprint. Through a series of strategic acquisitions — including five in just the past few months — the firm has grown to serve 8,000 banks, 1,500 insurers, and nearly 100 regulators worldwide. By combining global coverage with deep regulatory and technical knowledge, Regnology is well-positioned to transform regulatory reporting beyond a digitalized paper-based process to a streamlined, real-time workflow.
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