From the blog: Just when personal pension scheme administrators thought they understood and could confidently respond to the Financial Conduct Authority’s reporting requirements on members’ use of pension freedoms, the goalposts have been moved again.
An email sent to firms by the FCA’s market intelligence and data analysis department in February outlined changes to reporting requirements for the six months ending March 31 2017.
While there are a number of ‘improvements’ to the type and format of the data requested, it still gave those firms barely two months to both check their data are in order and then work out how best to analyse these and respond.
An email sent to companies by the FCA’s market intelligence and data analysis department in February outlined changes to reporting requirements for the six months ending March 31 2017.
While there are a number of ‘improvements’ to the type and format of the data requested, it still gave those companies barely two months to both check their data are in order and then work out how best to analyse these and respond.
They are devoting small armies of people and often significant technology resources to just one of many significant data reporting responsibilities
This highlights the challenges faced by such companies. They are devoting small armies of people and often significant technology resources to just one of many significant data reporting responsibilities.
Admin system needs to be fit for purpose
One could argue that this is simply a test of the quality of data governance in any financial services organisation and that such businesses should be able to take them in their stride.
However, the relatively last-minute changes to these reporting requirements do highlight important factors that must be at the forefront of the minds of those accountable to the FCA and other regulators.
The first is that their data have to be in sufficiently good shape to be able to interrogate them in the first place, so the administration system needs to be fit for purpose, preferably with strong data entry validation, and be robust, compliant and scaleable.
This way they have one core system of record and can focus their efforts on maintaining and enriching these data rather than multiple systems with various ancillary spreadsheets and other databases.
This then leads on to good use of application programme interfaces being essential in order to integrate with fund managers, banks and other data providers, ensuring automatic exchange and updates of data on a daily and sometimes real-time basis.
This inevitably reduces the reliance on manual input and should lead to better overall data quality.
The other significant challenge is being able to easily access the underlying database of your core system and having enough understanding to be able to extract the relevant data, or use the information to gain a better overall understanding of your business dynamics and metrics.
All this should be child’s play for those with a modern, well-structured database that supports analytical services that lets 'what if?' and other questions be answered in a non-technical way.
Claire Court is business development director at administration technology company Delta Financial Systems
