What is regulatory reporting and how does RegTech automate supervisory filings?

Regulatory reporting encompasses all legally required reports that banks and financial institutions must regularly submit to supervisory authorities. These include FINREP (financial reporting), COREP (own funds and capital adequacy), AnaCredit (granular credit data), LCR and NSFR (liquidity metrics), and national reports to BaFin and Bundesbank. The EBA has more than doubled data requirements in the past five years. Institutions must submit these filings on time, completely, and in the prescribed XBRL taxonomies.

RegTech solutions (Regulatory Technology) automate the entire reporting process from data extraction to submission. Modern platforms such as Regnology or ABACUS/DaVinci cover data integration, calculation, validation and transmission in a single system. Up to 90% of manual processes are eliminated, processing time per filing decreases by 60–75%, and advanced validation engines automatically check 5,000–10,000 business rules per reporting cycle. Cloud-based RegTech solutions also enable faster updates when regulatory requirements change.

By automating regulatory reporting with RegTech, banks can reduce compliance costs by 30–40%. Specifically: fully automated reporting chains reduce personnel costs by up to 50%, RPA for recurring tasks delivers an ROI of 300–800% within two years, and a centralized data warehouse reduces interface costs by up to 70%. Centralizing in a reporting Center of Excellence achieves additional synergy effects of up to 25%. The initial investment typically pays off within 18–24 months.

BaFin and ECB are the central supervisory authorities for regulatory reporting in Germany. BaFin oversees compliance with national reporting obligations under KWG and MaRisk, while the ECB conducts direct supervision of systemically important institutions through the SSM (Single Supervisory Mechanism). Both authorities increasingly demand granular data at shorter intervals. Since 2024, the ECB has intensified use of SupTech tools for automated analysis of submitted filings — further raising data quality and consistency requirements for banks.

Systematic data quality management reduces errors in regulatory filings by 60–75%. The approach includes data governance with clear responsibilities (data owners and data stewards), rule-based validation engines with over 1,000 business rules, data lineage for complete traceability from source system to final filing, and master data management to eliminate reference data inconsistencies. The "Data Quality by Design" principle — quality checks at the point of data capture — reduces downstream corrections by up to 70%.

Several established RegTech platforms serve German banks: Regnology (formerly BearingPoint RegTech) with its Reporting Hub serving over 7,000 financial institutions, ABACUS/DaVinci for regulatory calculations and filings, BAIS by msg GillardonBSM for integrated bank reporting, and AxiomSL ControllerView for data management and validation. The choice depends on institution size, filing volume, existing IT landscape and regulatory scope. ADVISORI assists with selection, implementation and integration of these solutions.

Banks should establish regulatory change management that systematically captures, assesses and implements new requirements. This includes monitoring regulatory publications from EBA, BaFin and ECB, conducting impact analyses on existing reporting processes and data models, using parameter-based RegTech configuration instead of custom programming, and applying agile implementation methods that deliver new requirements 30–50% faster. Cloud-based solutions offer the advantage of prompt updates without complex upgrade projects. ADVISORI supports institutions through regulatory changes from analysis to production deployment.