On 28 March 2024, the Bank of England (BoE) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a joint response to phase two industry recommendations and future strategy.

The BoE and the FCA are working together, and with industry, to improve the data collection process for both regulators and firms. In February 2021, the two regulators published a Transformation Plan which aimed to address issues with data collection. The plan set out the vision that ‘Regulators get the data they need to fulfil their mission, at the lowest possible cost to industry’, with three key areas central to achieving this:

  • Defining and adopting common data standards.
  • Modernising reporting instructions.
  • Integrating reporting.

To help deliver these reforms, the BoE and FCA set up a ‘join transformation programme’; a collaboration between the BoE, FCA and industry. Industry made several specific recommendations through the lens of use cases. As such, the latest industry recommendations for the phase two use cases have now been published. The publication outlines five outcomes to ensure regulators can access data at the lowest cost:

  • Data collections meet and are proportionate to regulators’ needs.
  • Effective and efficient internal processes for creating data collections.
  • Efficient processes and support for meeting regulatory obligations.
  • Clear and consistent data definitions.
  • Modern systems to underpin data collections.

It also highlights that the BoE and the FCA are undertaking a range of specific workstreams to achieve these outcomes, and the new insights produced will be applied to new data collections, processes and future reviews of existing collections.