FinregE warns FCA reporting changes could expose data gaps

By Puja Sharma

FinregE, a regulatory intelligence firm, issued new research proposing a fundamental shift in how financial institutions implement the Financial Conduct Authority’s PS26/15.

While the UK regulator’s move to streamline transaction reporting is a welcome step toward reducing undue burden, the London-based RegTech argues that for many firms, this simplification is a paradox. By removing data fields without first addressing the fragility of legacy data mapping, institutions risk creating a new layer of operational instability.

In the lexicon of financial regulation, “simplification” is often mistaken for a reduction in effort. The logic of PS26/15 is sound, reducing data volume to improve overall quality, but the industry assumption that fewer fields equate to less work is a fallacy, FinregE argues.

Transitioning standards is rarely a clerical exercise in deleting database columns, it is an exercise in organisational archaeology. In many legacy institutions, the map of where data originates and how it is transformed does not exist in a formal manual but resides in the fragmented memories of a few long-serving developers or within a graveyard of undocumented Excel macros.

The risk here is the “silent failure”, namely the subtle inaccuracy that evades system alarms but invites regulatory scrutiny. By altering reporting logic without a holistic understanding of data architecture, firms may inadvertently undermine the very data quality the FCA is seeking to enhance.

“The true burden of compliance is not the number of fields the FCA requires, but the fragility of the systems used to populate them,” said Rohini Gupta, CEO of FinregE and author of the research. “If a firm finds it difficult to remove three fields from a report, it is a diagnostic signal that their entire reporting architecture is too rigid. We are proposing that PS26/15 be viewed not as a routine IT chore, but as a strategic invitation to fix the plumbing of the institution.”

The only sustainable path forward is a move away from static reporting toward dynamic regulatory mapping. Rather than meeting policy changes with a flurry of panicked emails and manual spreadsheets, firms should adopt a centralised logic layer, effectively a digital twin of their regulatory obligations.

In such a system, a regulatory shift becomes a non-event. When the regulator mandates the cessation of a specific data point, the system identifies every instance across the enterprise and adjusts the output instantaneously. This elevates the compliance department from “data janitors” to strategic risk managers. As the margin for error shrinks in a leaner regime, operational resilience depends on the ability to decouple regulatory logic from underlying IT code.

FinregE facilitates this transition through its End-to-End Regulatory Operating System (FinregE Regulatory OS). By replacing static documents with a living logic layer, FinregE Regulatory OS allows firms to perform instantaneous impact analyses, identifying every affected data flow in minutes and eradicating the reliance on “tribal knowledge.”

“The regulators are streamlining their expectations; it is time for firms to streamline their architecture,” Gupta added. “PS26/15 is a litmus test for operational resilience.”