Digital Transformation in Financial Regulation

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Digital Transformation

Supervisory organizations have long prioritized the need for full digital transformation in order to automate manual processes, eliminate in-person services, and conduct all critical supervisory functions remotely including registration and onsite examinations.

Historically, data gathered for effective oversight have been collected manually through reporting templates submitted by mail, email, or fax, resulting in a slower, inefficient, and more error-prone process. Automation through SupTech implementation creates productivity gains by relieving regulatory resources from mundane, low-value data entry tasks, and empowering them to focus on high-value activities thus allowing for more efficient use of operational budgets, human resources, and implementation of data-driven decision-making.

Comprehensive end-to-end SupTech solutions facilitate and standardize data collection, processing, and analysis to help financial supervisors identify and manage risk more effectively and closer to real-time.

Download the Roadmap to Digital Transformation

Automate every aspect of their Financial Data Collection ensuring quality data intake.
Automate every aspect of License Registration and Renewal processes.
Automate all their Risk Management & Risk Assessment needs.
Automate every aspect of Onsite Inspections and Offsite Monitoring.
Automate every public-facing Business Process.
Provide a quick synopsis of the latest state of any organization or person of interest
Have all collected data pre-validated and centrally stored in an analytics database that can fire alerts in real-time and that color-codes and prioritizes the Analysts’ work based on predefined thresholds.

Have Predictive modeling and forecasting capabilities allowing regulators to uncover the latest AML trends, the latest cause-effect analysis to stay ahead of the regulated market.
Discover the latest trends by examining collected data, helping finetune regulatory processes, and ensure that they are current and effective.
Best of all, that platform needs to be highly configurable, allowing regulators to easily evolve the platform along with changes to Global Standards, Jurisdictional, Policy, or Legislative Needs.

Supervisory activities and processes from licensing to financial data collection, to risk assessment, to onsite inspections, to offsite monitoring to oversight rely on high-quality data internal alignment, and efficient tools, and manual responsibilities. Whether your organization is facing challenges like low data quality intake or time-consuming manual procedures, SQL Power’s End-to-End Financial Regulation Platform automates and simplifies these challenges and utilizes advanced analytics tools and artificial intelligence to aid in improving your current and future processes - ensuring that the SQL Power Suite is the last supervisory software solution that your organization will ever need.

The advent of technology in the financial sector has changed the way financial regulators operate, interact and monitor their regulated entities. In this digital age, Financial Supervisors need to adopt a new paradigm that changes the way they supervise, communicate, review, analyze and inspect their entities; while automating every aspect of their regulatory oversight functions. The rapidly evolving technological landscape of financial services requires a proactive and resolute approach from supervisors towards the use of SupTech technology.

SQL Power, a global leader in SupTech technology, have been providing data collection and analytics solutions since 1989. Since implementing the first Regulatory Solution in Canada in 2009, SQL Power has been at the forefront of Regulatory software innovation - rolling out the world’s first fully integrated data collection, return management and analytics solution designed specifically for supervisory business users.

SQL Power utilizes the SQL Power Suite, a comprehensive end-to-end Financial Supervision Framework. The platform is completely multilingual, e-Signature ready, and can integrate easily with existing regulators’ backend systems, as well as with other identified core applications to unify all of their regulatory operations while streamlining important supervisory activities.

The SQL Power Suite’s dynamic architecture allows business users to update data collection forms, workflows and business rules in order to reflect the latest regulatory, policy or legislative changes. The solution automatically renders web forms and returns from the latest business rules, and cascades changes throughout the system, without any need for re-coding – substantially reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and time-to-market for new forms and new business processes; while enabling complete business user self-sufficiency.

Automation of all license application forms each with their unique business processes
Automation of all financial returns and all related threshold metrics and Alerts
Automation of all change request forms and processes
Automation of all required complaint forms and associated investigative processes
Configuring of financial risk and overall risk assessment dashboards
Configuring of a 360-Degree Organizational & Individuals Views
Automation of all onsite inspection and offsite monitoring processes
Defining financial submission exceptions based on industry and risk profiles
Collection of all required payments and scheduling of all required meetings
Allowing regulated entities to download all licenses and PDF bundles of application processes
Development of all required alerts, custom reports, dashboards, and inline analytics

With SQL Power’s Financial Supervision platform, regulated entities will be able to log on to a secure web portal from the comfort and convenience of their own homes or offices complete all their interactions with the regulator, safely and remotely online. Regulated entities will be able to use any web browser to access all services, including all License Applications, all required Financial Submissions - Submitting only complete, accurate and consistent applications and pre-validated financial returns. As well as make all required payments and download all generated Licenses and Documents.

Case Management, Investigations & Complaints

Our goal is to fully Digital Transform your organization, this means going well beyond license applications and financial data collection and to also fully automate all Change Requests and Complaint forms which upon initial review can launch investigative processes in order to resolve any concerns or reported issues - utilizing SQL Power’s comprehensive case management capabilities.

Change Requests, whether they are director changes, name changes or address changes are automatically reflected in the organization’s latest 360-degree view. Complaint processing takes full advantage of the SQL Power Suite’s comprehensive case management capabilities, allowing users to send notifications, schedule review meetings, make manual or automated decisions, assign field work to investigators, prepare final reports, levy penalties or fines, collect payments and can even accommodate appeals processes.

Registration, Licensing & Renewals

In these changing times where efficiency, safety and full automation are key drivers for the future of registration and licensing – our platform makes it seamless to digitally transform all registration and licensing processes. Through the convenience of simplified on-line forms, sophisticated business process workflows, electronic signatures, payment collection, and certificate generation modules, SQL Power significantly reduces the manual workload typically associated with the registration and licensing Processes.

Our interactive forms facility highlights validation rules and warnings in real-time to the user to mitigate any data entry errors ensuring that only complete and consistent applications are submitted to the regulator. Our platform can easily integrate with existing legacy systems, CRM systems, and infrastructure for a seamless transition and immediate end-to-end automation of all required registration and licensing functions.

Quality & Proactive Financial Data Collection

Financial Regulation, Risk Mitigation and Offsite Monitoring relies heavily on high-quality data collection. Whether your organization is facing challenges like low data quality intake, obsolete data collection forms, or time consuming manual financial data procedures, SQL Power automates and simplifies every aspect of data collection, ensuring that only complete, consistent and accurate data are ever submitted to the regulator.

In a matter of weeks, SQL Power will replicate existing financial returns in our online Forms facility, make all required changes to meet current standards, add any missing validation rules and roll them out to your regulated entities. Effectively launching a systemwide standard and an automated web-forms based reporting platform that virtually eliminates the need for manual reviews, rejections and resubmissions.

Within seconds of an industry submission of a financial report, the system quickly assesses its adherence to predefined acceptable thresholds for key risk metrics and highlights any weak submissions by color-coding them with a red, yellow or green indicator - thus prioritizing scarce analyst resources’ work and focusing them on likely problematic submissions.

360-Degree Organizational & Individuals Overview

A 360-degree view of all pertinent information related to a regulated entity and its representatives is provided through the Organization Profile and Person Profile dashboards. Profiles are automatically updated when the system receives a valid submission whether it is a change request, a financial submission, a license approval/renewal or an Onsite Inspection final report. Authorized users are also able to update these profiles directly based on information uncovered during their day to day activities.

Analysts and management have ongoing access to the latest profile information for every organization including basic name/address information, risk assessment metrics and dashboards, active licenses, directors, senior officers, shareholders, related organizations, communications, onsite inspections, complaints, investigations, history of infractions, complaints, financial submissions, cases, payments and much more from one easy to access consolidated view. These Organization and Person Profile views are highly configurable and can be tailored to suit the regulators specific information and risk assessment needs.

Onsite Examinations & Offsite Monitoring

A key proactive supervisory function for regulators is to perform supervisory onsite examinations in order to investigate particular issues and to obtain a comprehensive assessment of the risk profile of their regulated entities.

SQL Power’s Onsite Inspection solution offers supervisory teams a web-based solution to automate and manage every aspect of their regulatory onsite inspection processes and functions. From choosing proportionate inspection activities relative to the associated risk profile of the inspected entity, to inspection lead assignment, to team selection, to notifications, to pre-inspection reports, to scheduling internal reviews and kick-off meetings, to developing a more in depth understanding of the supervised financial institutions, to anticipating future impacts from past and present figures to making recommendations, imposing limitations/conditions and other remedial activities when corrective measures need to take place.

All these recommendations, limitations and conditions are monitored by the offsite inspection team, through the 360-degree Organizational profile, and limitations are either lifted due to compliance or further sanctions, penalties, restrictions are imposed on the entity for ongoing non-compliance.

Advanced Analytics & Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence is the Science of machine learning from History!

“It is the science of making machines use data to gain insight, draw correlations, establish inference, now reserved for humans, and improve themselves to solve all kinds of problems.”

Gain insight to make smart decisions, identify bottlenecks, and discover opportunities for regulatory process improvements. Key financial ratios are assessed in real-time against submitted data providing analysts with early-warning in-line analytics.

The system also learns from historic data to derive reliable predictive models that are then used to mine recently collected data to provide early predictions of potential undesirable outcomes and provide you with the opportunity for early intervention to address any issue well before an institution’s failure - circumventing the impact on the public and maintaining confidence in the regulated market by all stakeholders.

Revolutionary in the SupTech space, SQL Power’s Integration Hub provides regulatory organizations with the following benefits:

Ability to continue operating legacy data collection systems and legacy processes (that work) while seamlessly making their data available in a consolidated Web Portal for real-time analysis and analyst review.
Ability to pull banking transactions (or AML) data on a daily basis directly from regulated entities’ back-end databases.
Ability to augment the 360-Degree Organization profile view with data currently being entered or collected in other legacy systems (CRM, Registry data, Call Centre data and other financial data that is collected elsewhere).
Ability to apply in-line analytics and other SQL Power risk assessment features equally to legacy data as well as SQL Power collected data.
Provide regulatory organizations with options for a phased rollout of the SQL Power SupTech solution while leveraging all of our analytics and risk management features from Day One.

All of the above can now be accomplished within our platform without any need to develop expensive data migration processes to facilitate this unprecedented level of integration – all while reducing regulatory organizations’ operational costs, improving efficiency, and utilizing scarce resources more effectively.

The SQL Power Integration Hub will help Simplify, Expedite and De-Risk any Regulatory Implementation!

The SQL Power Suite is the most robust and compelling regulatory solution on the market, delivering the ultimate in regulator flexibility, self-sufficiency, efficiency, and transparency; increasing the likelihood of timely successful intervention while providing all interested parties with the ultimate confidence in the regulated market. It will not only address current regulatory needs and integrate easily with the current technical environment, but it will also pave the way for future regulatory changes thus future-proofing the organization and ensuring that it will satisfy the regulators SupTech requirements for decades to come.

Power EAS integrates the components of the SQL Power Suite with powerful web portal technology and single sign-on (SSO) capability that can be tied to an existing
identity management system. EAS provides a secure platform that implements top ten OWASP-recommended security practices. The Power EAS is the suite’s web portal that manages the entire end-user experience from system administration to submission of financial returns, change requests, and license applications, as well as review and approval/ rejection of all submissions.

Power Analytics bundles SQL Power’s proven ETL technology with pre-built MicroStrategy reports, graphs and dashboards (including mobile versions) to deliver business intelligence value starting day one. Once validation and certification of submissions is complete, the submitted data is loaded into the Power Analytics database.

SQL Power’s real-time Power Analytics platform is the most powerful Regulatory Business Intelligence (BI) platform on the market delivering a pre-built data mart solution that is Taxonomy agnostic (no ETL changes required) and a BI tool in MicroStrategy that provides all Business Intelligence requirements including standard reports, ROLAP cubes, Data Mining, Mobile Dashboards, and ad-hoc reporting.

The proposed new reporting environment will provide the regulator with a centralized analytics database for ad-hoc as well as highly structured reporting. Pre-engineered Power Analytics for analytical and statistical reporting against regulatory information, as well as reporting on system usage, turn-around times, and bottlenecks come prebuilt. It is capable of generating financial ratios, peer group analysis, multi-dimensionality, trend and root cause analysis, and other important risk management KPIs. Mechanisms to manage captured data from multiple sources and to generate industry and sectoral reports for internal/external dissemination, and report distribution across stakeholder entities is also supported.

Roadmap to Full Digital Transformation in Financial Regulation

The advent of technology in the financial sector has changed the way financial regulators operate, interact, and monitor their regulated entities. In this digital age, Financial Supervisors need to adopt a new paradigm that changes the way they supervise, communicate, review, analyze and inspect their entities; while automating every aspect of their regulatory oversight functions. The rapidly evolving technological landscape of financial services requires a proactive and resolute approach from supervisors towards the use of SupTech technology.

SQL Power’s regulatory platform also offers the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) on the market. Being business-rule driven and having the business users in the driver’s seat eliminates ongoing IT and consulting costs associated with evolving, maintaining, and supporting the regulatory system. Our pre-built real-time Analytics platform comes bundled with MicroStrategy (the world’s leading BI tool) eliminating the need to buy expensive software for the Business Intelligence platform. Finally, since the system is virtually turn-key (with no need for any code changes), SQL Power is providing the most stable, and maintenance-free, production environment.