Global Trustee and Fiduciary Services News and Views Issue 50

meanings in and across business functions and communities of practice. The emergence of fintech, regtech and suptech will do little to solve fundamental problems if the industry fails to maintain a common language. The essential issue of arriving at shared business and regulatory terminological dictionaries, thesauri and taxonomies is a huge challenge and a significant obstacle for regtech. However, applied research by the Bank of England (BoE), the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), financial institutions, professional services companies, fintech and regtech vendors, and the University College Cork (UCC) team illustrates that this problem can be solved through a standards- based approach to digital regulation and digital regulatory compliance and reporting. Contemporaneous with this are initiatives by the RegTech Council (RTC) which also recognises the need for a standards-based approach. The need for a paradigm change is set out in an RTC paper written by UCC and other contributors. 7, 8, 9 Towards standards-based digital regulatory reporting In November 2017, the BoE and the FCA held the model driven machine executable regulatory reporting TechSprint. The sprint had 50 participants and took place over the last two weeks of November 2017. Participants included both regulators, along with other industry participants. 10 The UCC team had the distinction of participating from the outset. The preparation for this two-week event went on for several months with numerous regular meetings between participants to scope and devise a plan of action, significant undertakings in and of themselves. In essence, the TechSprint proved that a regulatory requirement in the FCA Handbook could be transformed into a standards-based language that both humans and machines can understand and that could then be used to execute a regulatory requirement, effectively pulling the required data directly from a firm’s data stores. The success of this endeavour led to several BoE-FCA-sponsored roundtables, focusing on the legal, technology and governance domains.