About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

ModelDrivers Outlines the Potential of Data Point Modelling to Meet Regulatory Demands

Subscribe to our newsletter

ModelDrivers is piloting its ModelDR data point modelling solution at a large US headquartered investment bank that initially intends to use the software to support MiFID II reporting. To date, the European Banking Authority (EBA) is the only major financial services organisation that has adopted data point modelling – the authority’s Common Reporting and Financial Reporting requirements are based on a data point model – but ModelDrivers expects further adoption as banks struggle to achieve regulatory compliance using legacy, and often siloed, data management systems.

The concept of data point modelling is not new, as well as EBA’s adoption, it underlies the XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) standard format for reporting, but banks are only now beginning to explore its potential.

Greg Soulsby, co-founder of ModelDrivers and former chair of a working group at XBRL International, says the company’s pilot project should come to fruition in the near future and that it is talking to half a dozen additional banks about data point modelling.

He explains: “Data point modelling is a design level practice that deals with the logic of data rather than physical data. It can dice data in existing systems such as databases and data warehouses into small blocks that can be wired together on the fly as new business demands emerge. It can also be used to model regulations and turn them into data, which means systems data and regulatory data can be in one place, in a congruent format, and can be wired together as necessary.”

As well as providing a flexible data management model that can be used to create solutions for compliance with numerous regulations, data point modelling could play into increasing regulatory demand for ‘cubes’ of multi-dimensional data rather than traditional reports, and support the requirement of Basel’s BCBS 239 regulation for banks to have a logical data model. There is also potential for reduced cost and improved efficiency as speed and agility can be gained without the need to implement new systems.

ModelDrivers’ ModelDR product reverse engineers data schemas from existing databases, spreadsheets and reports; designs data solutions in standardised financial taxonomies; creates data architecture and dictionaries necessary for generating new queries and reports; and provides access to metadata for those who need it.

By providing data congruence across disparate legacy systems, ModelDR integrates siloed data and removes the cost and time of building data warehouses. It also enables the implementation of a standardised and universal financial language, and provides tooling to ensure data elements and attributes are precisely defined, aligned to meaning, described as metadata and managed across the data lifecycle.

As a small company set up just over a year ago, ModelDriver works with partners to take ModelDR to market. Among them are consultancies and technology specialists such as MarkLogic, which can integrate and implement its semantic technology with ModelDR, bringing meaning to data and making it easier for banks to generate solutions and answer questions. Soulsby concludes: “Banks can’t go on using complex and siloed systems in today’s regulatory environment. Data point modelling and semantics are not a ‘nice to have’ solution, but powerful tools for next generation data architecture.”

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Upcoming Webinar: Hearing from the Experts: AI Governance Best Practices

9 September 2025 10:00am ET | 3:00pm London | 4:00pm CET Duration: 50 Minutes The rapid spread of artificial intelligence in the financial industry presents data teams with novel challenges. AI’s ability to harvest and utilize vast amounts of data has raised concerns about the privacy and security of sensitive proprietary data and the ethical...

BLOG

FCA Multi-Firm Review on Off-Channel Communications: Implications and Next Steps

By Paul Cottee, Director, Regulatory Compliance, NICE Actimize. The UK’s financial regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), recently published the results of its multi-firm review into off-channel communications within wholesale banking. Off-channel communications, in this context, refer to any professional communication that occurs outside of the firm’s approved channels, such as personal emails, instant messages,...

EVENT

Data Management Summit London

Now in its 16th year, the Data Management Summit (DMS) in London brings together the European capital markets enterprise data management community, to explore how data strategy is evolving to drive business outcomes and speed to market in changing times.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...