Reporting rules for banks rationalized

MANILA, Philippines — The Bangko Sentral ng Piiipinas (BSP) has rationalized the prudential reporting requirements for banks as part of efforts to promote ease of doing business in the industry.

BSP Governor Benjamin Diokno said the central bank’s Monetary Board, through Resolution No. 1479, approved the amendments to the (Reports Required of Banks) under Section 173 of the Manual of Regulations for Banks (MORB).

Diokno said the changes are part of the report rationalization initiative of the central bank.

The BSP chief said the regulator is continuously reviewing the prudential reports required from BSP supervised financial institutions (BSFls) to ensure that information being gathered remain relevant to the surveillance and supervisory functions of the central bank amid significant developments in the regulatory and business environment.

“The report rationalization initiative aims to contribute to continuing adherence to internationally recognized standards and practices on data aggregation and governance as well as promote ease of doing business in BSFls,” Diokno also said.

Under the amendments, the BSP has deleted the reports listed in “Annex A” from the reports required to be submitted by banks.

DIokno said earlier the BSP has developed a prototype that allows machine-to-machine link between the central bank’s system and those of its supervised entities for streamlined transmission, processing, warehousing, and analysis of banks’ prudential reports.

“Targeted to go live by the latter part of 2020, this innovation will significantly improve timeliness, ease, and integrity of data submission,” Diokno added.

The planned application program interface (API) would automate the collection, processing, and analysis of data from supervised institutions.

He said that supervised entities that cannot immediately migrate to the API-based reporting could use the financial institution (FI) portal for the submission of their reports.

“All of these are aimed at streamlining our manual-intensive processes, thereby enhancing the timeliness and quality of our risk-based decision-making and financial system supervision,” he said.

Previously, Diokno said banks were burdened by an extensive and time-consuming validation process, involving more than 240 Excel-based data entry templates with 100,000 plus data points.

“The resulting delays and the scope for human error posed complications on our data and statistical compilation operations. With this modern API system, manual intervention is eliminated since data sorting, sanitation and validation processes are fully automated and secured,” he said.

With the same 7,000 data validation rules being applied, he said processing time of filed returns was already cut to just 10 seconds each from more than 30 minutes, thereby streamlining the entire end-to-end process of regulatory reporting and validation.