Whistlebrook concerned about COREP impact on financial firms

From 31 December 2012 lenders and some investment firms will have to comply with Common Reporting (COREP) to the European Banking Authority (EBA) as part of the Capital Requirements Directive.

This will establish a central hub for European banking data, which aims to improve risk identification and management for cross-border institutions.

Whistlebrook, which supplies back office software for financial services firms, has expressed concern that organisations have not fully appreciated one of the impacts of the impending COREP requirements.

At present firms do not need to have a software solution for the submission of regulatory returns as it is currently possible to do this directly - through manual input into the FSA’s Gabriel (GAthering Better Regulatory Information ELectronically) system and BEERS (Bank of England Electronic Reporting System).

However, the EBA has announced it will not be providing a similar offering for COREP meaning that all firms needing to submit regulatory returns to the EBA will have to use one of the electronic submission methods.

It will only be possible to submit COREP returns by web upload of an XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) file. Direct submission via manual input of data will not be an option.

As a consequence all firms needing to submit COREP returns will have to do so either using submission solutions that they develop themselves or purchase a software solution that can perform the task. In-house solutions may be an option for some firms but the smaller ones tend not to have the resources to undertake such tasks.

Whistlebrook says that software solutions for COREP tend to come with large price tags as they are sophisticated products created to assist with data gathering and submission.

For this reason Whistlebrook has developed a regulatory reporting product, WIRES (Whistlebrook Integrated REgulatory Submissions), that can collect the data required for the forms. But more importantly it can be used as a portal for data input, validation, analysis and form submission to the regulatory authorities.