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The paradoxical problem with the simplification of banking regulations

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HSBC and JPMorgan have a problem with their “return to the office” strategies. Having reduced their real estate footprints during the pandemic, they don’t really have enough office space for employees to return.

JPM’s Great Campus in Columbus, OhioNow operates a “park and walk” scheme because there is not enough parking if all desks are busy. There has been Talk about fights On ergonomic chairs. And in the New London office of HSBC, the current estimate is that there are 7,700 seats less than vagrants. Even if you can persuade merchants to crush the battery chickens or tube travelers, it is likely that there are bath provision and elevator capacity problems that will be difficult to solve.

That is, of course, very funny. But the question of “How can you not know if there is enough desktop space before making this type of order?” It raises another problem, one that is actually quite important for financial regulators at this time. When a large bank confuses the office space, it is only annoying. If you can’t break the exhibitions to private creditor for flood riskOr Russian sanctions, that is potentially dangerous.

The problem is that, although the mental image of the people of the bank information systems is something like this:

The reality is too often like this:

Basically, banks are large and complicated and change all the time, which creates a “war fog” impious in the upper part. It is a tension for all divisional and geographical systems to meet and produce the quarterly accounts, an additional voltage to produce mandatory monthly regulatory presentations and limit with an unreasonable application to expect much more. No one creates a great financial institution Ex nihilo – They always grow, organically.

A business unit that will just begin to maintain its own records informally, potentially even on a single spreadsheet. As it becomes bigger, you could order custom software and define your own data types. When it becomes large enough to move the dial at the group level, people always look back and want everything to be integrated into the main accounting and risk management systems from day one. But, of course, that would have been a disproportionate amount of time and effort to spend on a small start project.

Obviously, it would be better for banks to have scalable and modular IT systems capable of handling all kinds of records of records in a flexible way, automating data collection and providing a unique vision of all the risks that are customizable at will depending on the events of the day. The industry loves this idea. He loves the concept so much that many large banks will have up to three or four systems of this type, more or less not used after a failed integration project.

It is called “aggregation of risk data and risk reports” (RDarr), and at this time it is one of the biggest problems for bank supervisors. On the ECB Agenda “Supervision Report Conference“This week, you can see that things are being driven by the desire to reduce the load of regular reports and send data. But if you are doing that, then you should be able to do on purpose Applications to understand the problems as they arise.

Paradoxically, if RDARr systems are more “Steampunk Distopia” than “cybernetic panoptic”, measures to lighten routine load without compromising supervision further Inconvenient and expensive for banks that only submit the same old reports.

Of course, the solution is that banks really invest a batch of money to put into account your RDarr systems. To do that, you may need to grow and take advantage of economies of scale. That is a reason why Many people He wants to see bank mergers in Europe. But, of course, it is much easier to be in favor of “consolidation” in the abstract than support A real fusion In your own backyard.

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