Perhaps the negative view of regulatory obligations needs to be reassessed. Risk management begins with risk measurement. This figure is conservative. In the present climate, finding the right staff, and perhaps more importantly, keeping them, is proving difficult. Little wonder that in the to reduce costs, banks have looked at other ways to produce reports, or rather to make their regulatory personnel as productive as possible.
Technology can be of great assistance.
The tasks required to produce regulatory reports are largely administrative, and can thus be greatly automated. The problem lies essentially in a lack of integration across information systems. Information is usually distributed across a range of different databases, in different departments, sometimes even in a different country. As data is typically scattered across a variety of incompatible information systems, the process of gathering information is often conducted manually. Some financial institutions have developed their own makeshift solutions to delivering regulatory reports.