The FCA’s move to simplify transaction reporting could create a different challenge for firms, with FinregE warning that fewer reporting fields could expose weaknesses in how data is mapped across financial institutions.
The Financial Conduct Authority’s PS26/15 is intended to streamline transaction reporting by reducing the number of required data fields. While the changes should ease some reporting demands and improve data quality, regulatory intelligence specialist FinregE argues that firms should not mistake fewer fields for less work.
Instead, the changes could force financial institutions to examine how reporting data is collected, transformed and transferred across their systems. For firms with fragmented legacy infrastructure, this could reveal weaknesses that have remained hidden for years.
FinregE’s research highlights data lineage as a particular concern. Many organisations still rely on outdated spreadsheets, undocumented processes or the knowledge of employees who understand how different systems connect. Changing reporting requirements without a clear view of these dependencies could introduce errors that are difficult to detect.
The result could be what FinregE describes as a “silent failure”, where changes to reporting logic appear to work internally but ultimately produce inaccurate regulatory submissions. This could undermine the FCA’s objective of improving data quality while creating additional operational and compliance risk for firms.
The company argues that PS26/15 should therefore be treated as an opportunity to rethink regulatory data infrastructure rather than simply another implementation exercise. Its proposed approach centres on dynamic regulatory mapping, where firms maintain a centralised view of their regulatory obligations and the systems affected by changes to those requirements.
Under this model, changes to reporting rules could be mapped across the organisation automatically, allowing firms to identify affected processes and systems without relying on manual reviews. FinregE said this could reduce dependence on institutional knowledge and allow compliance teams to spend more time on risk management and strategic priorities.
The approach forms part of FinregE’s Regulatory OS, which is designed to replace static compliance documentation with a live regulatory logic layer. The platform uses its AI RIG engine across tools covering regulatory horizon scanning, mapping, governance, assurance and workflow management.
FinregE CEO Rohini Gupta said, “The true burden of compliance is not the number of fields the FCA requires, but the fragility of the systems used to populate them. If a firm finds it difficult to remove three fields from a report, it is a diagnostic signal that their entire reporting architecture is too rigid. We are proposing that PS26/15 be viewed not as a routine IT chore, but as a strategic invitation to fix the plumbing of the institution.”
Gupta added, “The regulators are streamlining their expectations; it is time for firms to streamline their architecture. PS26/15 is a litmus test for operational resilience.”
The warning comes as regulatory reporting increasingly depends on firms being able to understand and adapt their data infrastructure quickly. For institutions with complex technology estates, the FCA’s reporting changes could therefore become a test of how resilient those systems really are.
Rather than viewing regulatory changes solely as compliance deadlines, firms may increasingly need to treat them as a test of their underlying data architecture. PS26/15 could provide an early indication of which institutions have a clear understanding of their regulatory data, and which are still relying on systems held together by legacy processes and institutional knowledge.
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