The Growing Importance of Big Data Analytics in Compliance Reporting for Financial Services

Advancements in technologies and ever-growing and changing regulations have created a more challenging landscape for today's financial services industry. From adhering to financial compliance requirements to managing global tax function, several financial institutions or banks are subjected to heavy fines and penalties.

Looking at how compliance reporting is being done right now, most would find it to be a significantly manual, multi-step, severe process that lacks transparency. However, there is an intrinsic need to formalize this process in the financial services domain. Most banks or financial services providers are now seeking technologies that can streamline the painstaking compliance requirements as traditional approaches require longer processing times to simplify and evaluate the huge amount of data essential for regulatory reporting.

This is where Big Data comes into the scene and rescues the banks and financial institutions. The current big data solutions, compared with traditional approaches, can very effectively incorporate multiple, distinctive data sources and assess massive data volumes, lessening compliance analytics cycle times from weeks to days. Most big players in the financial services market globally are leveraging next-gen big data analytics to faster, robust and exceptional regulatory compliance analytics delivery.

Recently, PwC has developed a suite of services, named Managed Services, aimed at a holistic approach to data management, analytics, and reporting functions. The platform designed to specifically address challenges within finance and tax.

As data is classified into different types and encompasses reference data, transactional data, operational data, and security data, they significantly differ in terms of size, shape, frequency of change and each of these data types needs to be managed precisely.

For many banks, particularly the smaller ones, the high cost of meeting regulatory requirements is also an encumbering thing. And violations of these requirements are even expensive and sometimes exorbitant for smaller banks that make lesser capital than larger banks. So, big data analytics can provide more fiscally beneficial in the long run against the potentially billions of dollars in fees and fines over small errors.

Why is Regulatory Compliance Reporting Significant?

In today's global business environment, regulations are changing with the political winds, which means companies must keep up-to-date with these developments and adapt their business practices accordingly to remain on the right side of the law. Compliance reports provide detailed accounts of a business's progress on particular or collective compliance initiatives, which can give a comprehensive summary of the company's compliance efforts.

Compliance reports also classify areas within the company where compliance initiatives are being adhered to effectively and those areas wherein more work is needed to meet the regulatory standards or internal controls.