Revolutionizing Financial Reporting: A Case Study in API-Based Prudential Reporting

Revolutionizing Financial Reporting: A Case Study in API-Based Prudential Reporting

In a move to modernize its supervisory capabilities, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the central bank of the Philippines, has successfully prototyped an innovative API-based prudential reporting system. This groundbreaking initiative addresses the long-standing challenges of incomplete, delayed, and inconsistent data submissions from financial institutions.

From left: Rosita Najmi (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Vicente De Villa (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas), and Dragan Oremuš (Compliant Risk Technology LLC)

The Challenge: A Manual and Resource-Intensive Process

The BSP's Supervisory Data Center (SDC) was previously burdened by a manual and highly resource-intensive data processing system. This led to significant consumption of resources for data cleaning and validation, hindering the BSP's ability to conduct timely and effective supervision.

Key challenges included:

• Incomplete Data Submissions: Financial institutions often submitted partial or missing data sets
• Delayed Reporting: Manual processes created significant time lags in data availability
• Inconsistent Data Quality: Lack of standardization led to varying data formats and accuracy
• Resource-Intensive Validation: Extensive manual effort required for data cleaning and verification

The Solution: A Partnership for Innovation

BSP worked with R²A (RegTech for Regulators Accelerator) and CRT on an API-based reporting prototype. The original project retrospective identifies CRT–Pinecone as the selected delivery partnership.

Documented pilot results

Figure 7 of the R²A retrospective records 29 reporting schemes consolidated into one unified XSD scheme. This describes reporting consolidation; it is not a general efficiency multiplier.

Central Banking’s September 2019 coverage reports average pilot processing time falling from 1,800 seconds to 10 seconds, with data points reduced by 53%, from 107,000 to 50,000. The project-study processing comparison excludes manual workarounds. These measurements apply to the historical pilot and its reporting scope.

The award coverage recognises BSP’s Data Management Initiative. CRT’s involvement is established by the project retrospective and BSP’s own account.

BSP’s later account: the API-XML journey and PRIME

In Box Article 3 of its First Semester 2023 report, BSP confirms its prototype partnership with CRT and R²A and describes the subsequent development of PRIME. Live implementation began with the June 2023 reporting cycle after development and parallel running.

For that later programme, BSP reports consolidation of 17 major Excel-based reports covering over 300 schedules into one XML file, with XML validation taking under a minute. These later results have a different scope from the original pilot. The prototype partnership does not establish that CRT alone supplied every later PRIME capability, and the figures are not performance guarantees for every CORA deployment.