Rabobank outsources parts of regulatory reporting to consultancy

Dutch bank Rabobank has decided to outsource parts of its regulatory reporting processes to European consulting firm BearingPoint. 

The agreement between the two parties comes at a time when banks more than ever are facing pressures to optimise and streamline their regulatory reporting to supervisory boards and central banks. Currently, most banks perform the activities in-house, but with complexities mounting and technologies becoming more advanced, outsourcing to specialised firms is emerging as an increasingly attractive option. 

BearingPoint’s award-winning suite of regulatory technology solutions – Abacus360 Banking and RegTech Factory – is one such third party solution that helps banks improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their compliance reporting, while enabling them to free up time internally for more value-adding activities. 

Abacus360 Banking is a standard solution for national and international regulatory reporting, for statistical reporting, for granular reporting, and for ad-hoc reporting. The solution covers the reporting requirements of EBA, ECB, SRB and national supervisory authorities, and is used by more than 1,000 reporting entities of financial institutions across Europe. 

In the case of Rabobank, the Dutch bank – a cooperative bank headquartered in Utrecht with around ninety branches in the country – has selected Abacus360 Banking to process its European regulatory reporting according to the requirements of the European Banking Authority (EBA) including CoRep and FinRep. 

BearingPoint’s RegTech Factory is the firm’s managed services offering – and in this case, Rabobank has engaged the consulting firm to take over the IT control and maintenance of its regulatory reporting processes. The so-called Regulatory-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering covers a variety of services related to the technical operation of BearingPoint RegTech’s regulatory reporting software solutions including infrastructure services, application management, support and data monitoring. 

Commenting on the decision to outsource, Margriet Simons, Manager Financial, Risk & Compliance Reporting at Rabobank said: “We were looking for a solution provider, who is able to really unburden us from regulatory reporting efforts by delivering both a standardised reporting software and managed services including regulatory maintenance of the solution.” 

“We are very proud that Rabobank will join our Dutch technology solutions community, and we are very much looking forward to a sustainable partnership,” said Alexander Turlot, who leads BearingPoint’s regulatory technology solutions business in the Netherlands.