25 April 2023

Date of meeting: 25 April 2023 | Location: Financial Conduct Authority (‘FCA’) and Microsoft Teams

Minutes

Data Standards Committee

Item 1. Introduction

AS introduced the meeting and ran through the meeting agenda. AS recapped the actions from the previous meeting. Some of the committee had volunteered to work on finalisation of the Data Standards Review (DSR).

Item 2. Data Standards Review

AD updated the group on the progress of the DSR. A subgroup of the committee had been working closely with EY to finalise the report. A final draft report had now been circulated to the committee, which Data Standards Committee (DSC) members had reviewed.

Members agreed that the report was well written and covered almost all of their own concerns. Committee members requested some final changes, to add a summary of the benefits of standards to the findings and recommendations, and clarification around the suggestion of an ongoing committee for data standards. 

DSC members agreed to request these changes to the report, and to publish the report subject to these changes.

The committee discussed next steps. AD and AS agreed that they would like to publish the report as quickly as possible. AD suggested that the committee could just publish a covering letter with it. He suggested a tentative deadline of 31 May for the committee to draft its response to the report, with publication in mid-June. AD confirmed that the DSC would respond by producing a set of recommendations.

LD explained that for regulators to be in a position to respond simultaneously would depend on the speed of the committee’s recommendations, and the detail of those. AD expressed concern that publishing simultaneously would risk the committee looking like it had tailored its recommendations to the regulators’ plans. LD explained that to publish the recommendations without the regulators’ response risked creating uncertainty while the industry waited for a response. AS replied that the Bank would not practically be able to respond by mid-June.

The committee agreed that it would meet to discuss its recommendations and that regulators could attend to keep up to date with progress. The group agreed to have at least three discussions over a period of three weeks, to decide its recommendations. AD proposed that DSC should discuss what a good standards initiative would look like, including the role of regulators. The committee agreed to this and to discuss this at its first recommendations discussion.

AD agreed to draft a covering statement to accompany the EY report and to circulate this to DSC for their review.

Item 3. Update on Phase 1 implementation

The Bank gave an update on the progress of implementation of the Phase 1 recommendations. The Bank was on track to deliver a new webpage for statistical reporting by July 2023. It had also designed a new page for Form DQ and was considering how to scale this across other reports. 

Regarding restructured reporting instructions, Bank staff had found in their user testing that the existing prototype was limited in its scope and would be difficult to maintain and scale. The team were therefore reconsidering the solution design, to make this more scalable to other reporting.

Regarding counterparty classification standardisation, the Bank was making good progress on building a business case and roadmap for integrating this into reporting instructions. Again, the Bank had refined its plan off the back of user testing and was now focusing on delivering the long-term element of the recommendations, rather than first building an incremental solution, as the prototype envisaged had not tested well.

Item 4. Guidance on the form of TDC Recommendations

AD and AT (who is chair of the Reporting Transformation Committee) had recently discussed how to approach the process of forming recommendations at the end of Phase 2. AT started by presenting how the recommendations process worked during Phase 1. Use case teams did the discovery and design work and presented this before industry committees. Committees published recommendations, endorsing their preferred solutions, and authorities then published a response. 

AT proposed to aid the phase 2 process by providing guidance to the use case teams on how to produce the first draft of the recommendations for discussion by industry. The chairs had produced a template with some key points they would like the use case teams to cover in their documentation of solutions, that the committee would want to consider in its recommendations. The committee agreed to send this to the use case teams.

Item 5. Report on digital regulatory reporting

LD presented the findings of a report written by PA Consulting on the evolution of digital regulatory reporting initiatives. This had investigated five major projects on this topic and identified learnings from these. The report had found that the Bank and FCA should consider common data models, and an Agile/DevOps approach in their work on TDC, given that these have been common to successful initiatives.

Item 6. Forward agenda / AOB

AS outlined the forward agenda for the coming months. DSC would have a series of meetings in May to discuss its response to the DSR. In June it would discuss phase 2 solutions in more detail, before then beginning the process of making recommendations in July.

Attendees:

Ffion Acland (FA), Goldman Sachs

Julian Batt (JB1), Bank of America

Jessica Bohane (JB2), Admiral

Chris Caldwell (CC), Financial Conduct Authority

Gabriel Callsen (GC), International Capital Market Association

Lauren Dixon (LD), Financial Conduct Authority

Andrew Douglas (AD), Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (chair)

Dawd Haque (DH), Deutsche Bank

Tom Jenkins (TJ), HSBC

Jane Laughton (JL), Bank of England

Angus Moir (AM), Bank of England

Angela Pearce (AP), Pension Insurance Corporation

Corinne Powley (CP), Phoenix Group

Peter Royle (PR), Financial Conduct Authority

Olivia Selbie (OS), Financial Conduct Authority

Aaron Shiret (AS), Bank of England

Nicola Sincock (NS), Santander

Claire Thompson (CT), Lloyds Banking Group

Andrew Turvey (AT), Belmont Green

Other Bank and FCA staff observing

Apologies:

Naomi Beckett, UBS

David Shone, International Securities Lending Association

Richard Young (RY), Bloomberg