Sydney, Australia-based RegCentric has won the award for Best Regulatory Consultancy in A-Team Group’s first live RegTech Insight Awards – APAC 2022. The awards celebrate leading providers of regulatory solutions, services and consultancy to capital markets participants across Asia-Pacific. The winners are named after A-Team Group’s RegTech Insight community votes for its favourite providers in a number of RegTech categories.
Katherine Natividad, senior consultant at RegCentric, talks to A-Team about the award-winning consultancy, its clients and solutions, and the benefits it can deliver to capital markets participants. She also touches on the consultancy’s development roadmap.
A-Team: Katherine, please tell us a little about RegCentric and the types of capital markets clients the consultancy works with.
Katherine: RegCentric is a young technology and business consultancy founded five years ago. Our goal is to provide solutions for financial institutions, particularly in the areas of regulatory reporting, risk and data management. We offer business and operations support, as well as technology implementation and automation capabilities.
RegCentric’s customer base is wide and varied. It includes banks, traders, pension funds and more, essentially any financial firm with regulatory obligations.
A-Team: What challenges are these financial firms facing in terms of regulatory compliance in APAC?
Katherine: Over the past five to ten years, there has been increasing regulatory scrutiny of reporting. Regulators have ramped up demand for data at a high level of detail and pushed for more transparency with a view to reducing risk and improving the resilience of financial markets. This move towards improved regulation has resulted in more data management challenges and complexity for financial institutions.
A-Team: What are the key regulations that firms must comply with in the region?
Katherine: There are quite a few. For example, regulatory reporting in Singapore is covered by the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) MAS 610 regulation. In Hong Kong, there is Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) reporting, and in Australia, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) supervises superannuation with prudential and reporting standards.
These regulations move on from fixed aggregated data forms to require more and different data, meaning many financial institutions need to deploy data transformation projects to achieve compliance.
There are also global regulations such as Basel IV, which focusses on banks’ capital holdings, and IFRS requirements around audit and accounting.
A-Team: How does RegCentric work with clients to provide solutions to these regulatory challenges?
Katherine: We address these challenges using a number of different approaches. We can start with educational webinars that are free for our clients. These cover issues such as regulatory change and provide advisory help for clients as well as a summary of key changes. We also provide training to give selected staff in financial organisations a deep understanding of regulations.
Advisory services can support implementation of regulatory reporting solutions or improve parts of the process, and as an advisory and technology consultancy, we can validate technology solutions.
From a resources perspective, when needed, RegCentric can put subject matter experts (SMEs) on the ground to augment project teams that lack resources.
A-Team: What are the potential business and operational benefits for capital markets participants working with RegCentric?
Katherine: We put the best people into every project every time to make projects effective immediately and a benefit to the business. All RegCentric’s consultants have a minimum experience of 15 years, many of them are former industry participants or have worked for regulators, and they have a 360-degree view of regulatory reporting challenges and how to implement solutions.
RegCentric applies technology to help achieve effective solutions and deliver operational benefits. We have great insight into and experience of automating regulatory reporting, which is becoming increasingly important as regulation becomes more complex.
We also work with partners to provide solutions, and have our own regulatory reporting platform called Reg360 that clients can use. Reg360 supports preparations for regulatory reporting, governance and automation. It is flexible to different regulations, supports daily operations, and provides better submissions. It also promises a better balance between work and life – or, as we say, ‘people can go home on time’ and avoid the extra time and effort often needed to meet regulatory compliance deadlines. Reg360 saves not only time, but also money as it helps firms avoid fines resulting from inaccurate reporting.
A-Team: How will you develop your award-winning regulatory consultancy over the next year?
Katherine: We see, and are responding to, a trend towards more data governance around regulatory reporting. Firms must provide raw data, so data quality, governance and accountability are key. As reporting data sets get bigger, getting the numbers correct is also based on good quality data collated at source and in a timely manner.
Adding data governance to reporting workflows will be an additional use case for Reg360. It is also an example of how we look at client challenges in conjunction with the bigger picture of Reg360 capabilities and complementary providers that can deliver overall offerings for clients.
A-Team: Finally, what does winning this award mean for RegCentric?
Katherine: We are very happy to receive the A-Team Group award for Best Regulatory Consultancy in APAC. Over the past five years, we have focused on helping our clients solve their complex regulatory challenges through a consulting approach that is both strategic and practical. This award affirms that we are on the right path. We have 100% successful client delivery and are delighted to gain recognition form our clients and the industry. The award provides an additional confidence boost for our team of expert consultants.
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