An innovative RegTech approach to financial risk monitoring and supervisory reporting

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to propose a bearer service, which generates and maintains a “digital doppelgänger” for every financial contract in the form of a dynamic transaction document that is a standardised “data facility” automatically making important contract data from the transaction counterparties available to relevant authorities mandated by law to request and process such data. This would be achieved by sharing certain elements of the dynamic transaction document on a bearer service, based on a federation of distribution ledgers; such a quasi-simultaneous sharing of risk data becomes possible because the dynamic transaction document maintain a record of state in semi-real time, and this state can be verified by anybody with access to the distribution ledgers, also in semi-real time. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, the authors propose a novel, regular technology (RegTech) cum automated legal text approach for financial transaction as well as financial risk reporting that is based on cutting-edge distributed computing and decentralised data management technologies such as distributed ledger (Swanson, 2015), distributed storage (Arneret al., 2016;Chandraet al., 2013;Caronet al., 2014), algorithmic financial contract standards (Brammertz and Mendelowitz, 2014;Breymann and Mendelowitz, 2015;Braswell, 2016), automated legal text (Hazard and Haapio, 2017) and document engineering methods and techniques (Glushko and McGrath, 2005). This approach is equally inspired by the concept of the “bearer service” and its capacity to span over existing and future technological systems and substrates (Kavassaliset al., 2000;Clark, 1988). Findings - The result is a transformation of supervisors’ capacity to monitor risk in the financial system based on data which preserve informational content of financial instruments at the most granular level, in combination with a mathematically robust time stamping approach using blockchain technology. Practical implications - The RegTech approach has the potential to contain operational risk linked to inadequate handling of risk data and to rein in compliance cost of supervisory reporting. Originality value - The present RegTech approach to financial risk monitoring and supervisory reporting is the first integration of algorithmic financial data standards with blockchain functionality.