The difficult child of regulatory reporting

In this period of annual closing and maximum effort for all reporting teams, you will probably agree that there is one that is particularly daunting. Consider these:

• It is one of the latest to be produced;
• It is both an annual and recent one, so you are less accustomed to produce it;
• It requires a different skillset as most other reports;
• It requires input from various departments, generating dependencies;
• It should be reconciled with almost any other report produced by the institution; and
• it requires its own internal validation instances.

I am of course talking about the Pillar 3 disclosures.

So a few thoughts on how to avoid the feeling that Pillar 3 is going to be the final nail in the coffin of your closing period:

• Anticipate and have it scheduled;
• Name a responsible who will act as single point of contact, a lot of the coordination can be done in advance and validation should be secured beforehand;
• Do not reinvent the wheel, and use last year’s report as a basis;
• Consider how you will integrate late adjustments, and post-closing corrections in your Pillar 3; and
• Do not forget to look at the figures and make sense out of it – which is the true joy of reporting.