As we know, Banking is one of the most highly regulated industries. As banks embark their accelerated journey towards digital transformation, it is imperative for the entire industry to meet the ever-increasing demands of regulators and adhere to required compliance. With the emergence of digital channels, there is exponential growth of data in banks, which provides newer opportunities to develop highly resilient, responsive, scalable, optimized and secured solutions for regulatory reporting. This rise of regulatory reporting as a service on cloud is quickly becoming the next big thing to improve efficiency, bridge control gaps and enable cost savings by leveraging disruptive exponential technologies.

Regulatory reporting relies on huge volumes of data that needs to be ingested from various sources, undergo data cleansing processes, quality checks, transformation and finally storage. Banks have been doing this for decades, however the increasing need of stringent regulatory requirements  coupled with processing of large volumes of data are shifting the industry towards cloud platforms. The need for authentication, authorization, data stewardship, data encryption, audit trail and data lineage are becoming more critical when it comes to managing a bank’s highly sensitive mission critical data. Banks can leverage rich sets of AWS services to build regulatory reporting capability on cloud and meet their growing regulatory business needs.

Regulatory Reporting on AWS Cloud

The reference architecture below depicts the process of a Bank’s regulatory reporting on AWS cloud, where the data access governance and compliance is maintained by AWS Lake Formation.

1. Data is ingested into Amazon S3 through AWS Transfer Family, AWS DataSync, Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and AWS Database Migration Service
2. Amazon S3 acts as a Data Lake for all the unstructured data collected from external and internal sources
3. AWS Lake Formation provides data access management and governance for the Data Lake. It supports Federated Authentication, Authorization, Data Catalog, Glue Crawlers enablement and Blueprints for databases integration
4. The raw unstructured data is transformed using AWS Glue ETL and AWS EMR services such as Hadoop and Spark. The transformed data gets stored in Data Lake as per regulatory requirements
5. Amazon Athena and AWS EMR services such as Hive and Presto are utilised to query the transformed data and create required regulatory reports with Lake Formation governance
6. The transformed data can be moved from Data Lake to structured Amazon Redshift Data Warehouse. Regulatory reports are prepared with the data stored in Amazon Redshift or Amazon Redshift Spectrum using AWS EMR services
7. Amazon QuickSight provides detailed visualization through interactive BI dashboards and facilitates actionable insights
8. AWS Key Management Service (KMS) is used for data encryption with AWS managed keys, customer managed keys and customer supplied keys to meet Bank’s IT security compliance

Benefits of Regulatory Reporting on AWS Cloud

1. Cost Optimization – A pay as you go model without upfront commitments
2. Scalable, Reliable, On-demand Infrastructure – Meet huge regulatory data processing needs with highly efficient underlying compute and services.
3. Time to Production – Reduced time to build a Data Lake from months to days using AWS Lake Formation
4. Ease of Data Processing – Data processing and reporting with AWS native and managed opensource services
5. Hybrid Cloud to rescue – Sensitive workloads can be processed on-premise using EMR on AWS Outposts before moving to Data Lake
6. Data security compliance – Data access governance and compliance with AWS Lake Formation and AWS IAM

Conclusion

Banks today are embracing cloud to deliver richer customer experiences through digital channel transformation. Now is time to leverage the full capabilities of cloud in the areas of Group Functions such as ‘Regulatory Reporting’ to improve efficiency, reduce cost and deliver better business outcomes. With the increasing need for digital transformation, Banks can turn regulatory reporting into an opportunity by leveraging power of data, automation and exponential technologies built on a hybrid cloud foundation. The future is Regulatory Reporting as a Service (RRaaS) on cloud and AWS with its managed services poised to simplify this adoption seamlessly.

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