Recognised as one of the most powerful central banks in the world, the Bank of England, exists to ensure both the monetary and financial stability of the United Kingdom. The Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) was created as a part of the Bank of England by the Financial Services Act (2012) and is responsible for the prudential regulation and supervision of approximately 1,700 banks, building societies, credit unions, insurers and major investment firms.

Project Overview

Within the Bank of England, the PRA Insurance Directorate was in need of a service to meet the Bank’s Solvency II (SII) Directive requirements for data collection, business data validation, and plausibility checking. As owners of the process, collecting data from firms and performing initial validation and plausibility checking, the Statistics and Regulatory Data Division (SRDD) had an interest in the delivery of effective solutions to streamline these processes.

 

As of January 1st, 2016, with the implementation of the SII Directive, firms were obligated to provide the PRA with SII quantitative and qualitative regulatory data returns on a quarterly and annual basis. Submissions were used to assess the solvency position of Insurers and provide sufficient information to support the Supervisory Review Process.

“The Bank of England chose Vizor and Core Filing after a rigorous tender process as it was the best fit to meet our Solvency II data collection requirements within tight deadlines”.

Jonathan Curtiss, Head of Programmes and Transformational Change. 

The Bank of England was in need of a solution that could collect a variety of data from external entities, and do so securely. The solution also had to perform appropriate business data, and plausibility validation on the data as well as allow users to load, define, apply and maintain business data and plausibility validation rules. In addition, XBRL processing, (including extraction and loading to downstream systems) was also an essential requirement.

Results

In October 2014 the project commenced, and on June 1st, 2015, the BEEDS System Portal went live for preparatory phase reporting and became ready for the full reporting phase January 1st, 2016.

 The Bank of England gained significant efficiencies from the implementation of Vizor’s Solvency II data collection templates and XBRL taxonomy configuration in the following core areas:

  • Operational reporting
  • Business to business capabilities
  • Data uploading, processing, and sharing
  • User Management

The project has been considered a great success, with all European Union, mandated deadlines having been met on time and budget.