The FCA and Bank of England's Proposed Use of Data

Rahman Ravelli’s Syedur Rahman outlines the approaches being adopted by the two organisations to enhance their regulatory capabilities.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England have announced plans to develop their data and analytics capabilities. 

This arguably comes as no surprise, with the Bank of England relying on high-quality data to meet its commitment to maintaining monetary and financial stability and the FCA needing it to ensure market integrity, effective competition and consumer protection.

The FCA’s refreshed Data Strategy sets out its plan to put an increased focus on advanced analytics and automation techniques to give it a deeper understanding of how markets function; allowing it to predict, monitor and respond to issues. It will invest in new technology, make greater use of external data and invest in skills and new working methods so it can better understand and use data and innovative technology. This approach will see data science units created in parts of the FCA. 

The Bank of England has published a discussion paper, “Transforming data collection from the UK financial sector’’, as the start of a review into the hosting and use of regulatory data over the next decade in order to use it more quickly and effectively in supporting supervisory judgements.

The FCA, the Bank of England and seven regulated firms have published jointly a viability assessment report on the latest digital regulatory reporting (DRR) pilot scheme to enable firms to automatically supply data requested by the regulators; with the aims of lowering the collection cost, improving data quality and reducing the data supply burden on the industry. 

Following this, the Bank of England and FCA have committed to continue to work together to explore common data standards and commission a review on the legal implications of writing reporting instructions as code. They are also set to review some technical solutions explored in the DRR pilot.

This is arguably a necessary requirement and investment for the regulators as there has been criticism relating to slow responses to complaints. Such investment will increase the chances of success when regulating and investigating.

This article was also featured on Lexology.com.