The Covid-19 pandemic is significantly affecting people and countries across the globe. All of us have had to adapt to a new way of living and working, which has put the operational resilience of many companies including banks under pressure. During this unprecedented period, the regulatory reporting landscape has been shifting rapidly, causing the regulatory reporting burden and ad hoc extraordinary disclosures to be particularly challenging for credit institutions. New technology solutions can help overcome these challenges?and in the process, help save money, maintain high-quality standards, and go beyond compliance.

Changes in the regulatory landscape require flexibility and agility

While overall regulatory supervision continues to apply, regulators delayed the reporting dates of some requirements. However, there are banks that must submit extraordinary reporting. To maintain business as usual, institutions must quickly adapt to the continuously evolving circumstances, regardless of the location of their workforce and the computing capacity pressure for more frequent regulatory calculations and report production.

All these challenges can be overcome through the adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS). This concept refers to the subscription of cloud-based applications hosted by a third party. This model uses external infrastructure, hosting, upgrading and services. It also relies on vendor subject matter expertise to monitor regulatory updates and deploy them into software remotely before they come into force. SaaS solutions can offer banks benefits that are not possible with installed applications, for instance, flexibility and scalability of computing resources that enable the preparation and production of reports without needing to be on site.

Be prepared for the new era with next-generation solutions

Regulators and risk managers follow an institution's performance closely, while the demand for improved performance in critical financial and regulatory areas in the banking sector increases month by month. Cloud technology offers capabilities to help both high performance and lower costs. Streaming architecture can be used for efficient business intelligence in near-real time, which is especially important during periods of volatility. Variance analysis capabilities can also help institutions quickly understand how metrics are changing even over short time periods.

The current crisis exposes the vulnerabilities of any infrastructure. The more people work remotely, the more likely and the more creative the cyberattacks. Scenarios like these are what cloud solutions were designed for. SaaS providers must ensure they fully realise the potential of cloud security capabilities, including end-to-end encryption and IP whitelisting, and compliance with regulators? guidance on outsourcing. All advantages of cloud computing can and should be accompanied by the highest security standards.

Summary

The Covid-19 outbreak presents a huge challenge for banks in terms of how to maintain their operations while meeting demanding regulatory requirements. SaaS offers a powerful, flexible solution to facilitate and streamline the entire regulatory compliance process while reducing the total cost of compliance. By choosing SaaS, banks can strengthen their operational resilience and maintain the highest governance standards regardless of personnel or economic circumstances. They can make better, faster decisions and build solid foundations to overcome any unforeseen future crisis.