The Financial Services Industry has been at the avant-garde of technological innovation for decades. However, while this has brought about increased productivity, the beneficial effect is of diminishing returns when in cross sector comparisons. Recent technological improvements (<10 years) have been substantial as we move into an era of big data. Many other sectors have faced large growth in productivity by adopting these technologies. However, due to large implementation costs due to legacy systems implemented in the 90’ and 00’s, the Financial Services sector has seen substantial barriers to delivery of new technologies.

As FISMA state “these legacy data and legacy systems, two decades later, are costly to maintain and create barriers to competition. In the absence of fully machine readable financial data (including contractual information) the sector will not realise the full potential contained in interoperability and data sharing solutions. [The financial sector] is falling behind sectors such as the automotive sector where (digital) interoperability between many users is well advanced.” FISMA: Financial Data Standardisations (EC, 16)
As such, technology is recognised as a key component to delivering the standardisation of European Regulatory Reporting.
The EC have stated “upgrading and where necessary harmonising data transport infrastructure to ensure seamless data flows could lead to the automatic reporting of trades entered.” Follow up to the Call for Evidence – EU regulatory framework for financial services (EC, Dec 17)

They go further to indicate a vision of a completely automated solution requiring no human intervention. “The Commission will explore the merits of possible initiatives that would enable firms to fulfil reporting requirements with no or minimum human intervention. This will greatly simplify and speed up the reporting and processing of data, and as a result dramatically reduce both the cost and burden of supervisory reporting.” Follow up to the Call for Evidence – EU regulatory framework for financial services (EC, Dec 17)

“The long-term objective is to have all reporting entities report their data only once, while providing access to all relevant authorities (the ‘report once principle’).” Follow up to the Call for Evidence – EU regulatory framework for financial services (EC, Dec 17)