How Vizor turned to RegTech after 20 years in business

After almost two decades of helping regulators with their data woes, Vizor is now also supporting financial institutions with its new RegTech offerings.

Vizor has changed. The company was launched in 2000 in Dublin, as a consulting company working only with central banks. Since then it has grown to become a trusted name in the supervisory technology space and cross-border automated exchange of information.

Today, Vizor’s client portfolio includes 25 financial regulators, 19 tax authorities and 30 banks across 30 different jurisdictions. But while the venture has primarily focused on alleviating the reporting pains of regulators in the past, Vizor recently decided to embark upon a new path. It was time to enter the RegTech space.

Of course, Vizor had, to some extent, been operating in the industry for years. Among other things, the enterprise had helped central banks to collect and analyse data more efficiently.

“Working with the regulators, we have been looking at the point at which the regulator received the data, on their ingestion of that data,” explains Joanne Horgan (pictured), chief Innovation officer at Vizor. “In one way, our focus on increasing the efficiency and automation of data collection for regulators was solving one half of the problem which was good for us to be able to help with, but increased data requests caused a larger burden on the industry.’’

The realisation prompted Vizor to start focusing on the regulatory reporting burden financial institutions had and, as a result, it decided to develop solutions to help them meet their compliance targets.

“In 2019 we have added two of the world’s leading suprevisors, who selected Vizor to replace their legacy data collection systems – the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA),” added Horgan. “These projects are transformative for these major financial markets and the wider APAC region, setting ambitious goals to streamline and advance data collection and encouraging the use of RegTech amongst their financial services industry. These events [encouraged] Vizor to focus on this region with its RegTech offering.”

Vizor’s latest innovations for the RegTech ecosystem, Vizor Reporting API and Vizor Reporting Centre, have been launched in both Singapore and Australia in 2020 to automate regulatory reporting. This reflects Vizor’s commitment to deliver new innovative solutions to digitalise and increase efficiency between regulators and regulated entities.

“When talking about core advantages about our RegTech solutions, we can summarise it in four key categories – cost-efficient, pre-validation of data, realtime updates and fast and scalable,” explains Horgan. Vizor Reporting API enables financial institutions to keep using their existing reporting solutions, but allowing them to pre-validate the data against regulator’s rules providing guaranteed “right the first time” submission. Vizor Reporting Centre acts as a web application and streamlines the workflow and explains what is required from financial institutions.

Vizor’s team has also endeavoured to make it clear that the two worlds of its regulator customers and its financial institutions clients are held separate. “We keep a Chinese wall, if you like, between [them],” Horgan explains.

Since launching the new RegTech solutions, financial institutions have enthusiastically embraced the new tools to bolster their compliance efforts. The solutions have been adopted across 30 banks in Singapore and by a number of financial institutions in Australia.

“Vizor’s Regulatory Reporting API for data pre-validation and preparation of the MAS610 data file format is being rolled out in 30 Singapore banks as a new component of our partner Wolters Kluwer’s OneSumX platform,” Horgan says.“In Australia, we are engaging with banks and insurance companies, and closely collaborating with the RegTech Association to help educate and share our knowledge regarding regulatory reporting within the industry.”

And it it might just be the beginning. Given Vizor’s supervisory technology is already trusted by financial regulators across 30 jurisdictions, it seems natural that the company is going to start offering its RegTech solutions across many more jurisdictions too.

“There is a huge opportunity here,” she says, adding that a lot of lawmakers and regulators around the world are working on making reporting more seamless. She mentions that Vizor is currently working with the central bank of the year, the Bank of Ghana to make its APIs available to financial institutions there.

“What we see is that there’s a real pain for financial institutions with regulatory reporting [and] there’s a desire from regulators to help solve that pain,” Horgan argues. “I think what we’re seeing is that there will be more consolidation in regulatory standards and data models along with the move towards more granular data.

’’In the RegTech space, I also see a risk at the moment where financial institutions don’t want to end up with ten different RegTech solutions. There will be a move towards multi-purpose platforms, whether that is multiple solutions that can integrate in a seamless way via APIs or where we start seeing more consolidation of solutions where you have different parts of compliance and regulatory reporting coming together.’’

If you want to hear more insights from Joanne Horgan, then you are in luck as she is one of the distinguished speakers at the Global RegTech Summit on September 22 and 23.

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