NTT DATA, a recognised leader in global technology services, is today announcing the successful completion on a Proof of Concept (PoC) trial for data analysis in conjunction with Reportix, a company that specialises in flexible data management, for the Bank of England (BoE) Fintech Accelerator Programme.

The PoC delivered each of the required BoE deliverables in less than 20 days and successfully met the three criteria set out ahead of the programme. BoE invited NTT DATA and Reportix to provide a PoC to explore how innovations in extensible business reporting language (XBRL) processing technology could enable the BoE to significantly reduce the cost of change, drive resource efficiencies and improve speed and flexibility of access to large quantities of regulatory data from financial institutions.

The solution, NEXTERA XBRL, realises both flexibility and searchability, to ingest, store and analyse highly structured financial data sets at speed. This is important as analysis of data received in XBRL is key to the BoE’s mission, covering front line supervision to wider micro and macro prudential supervision. The solution at its core, uses a MarkLogic NoSQL database, giving users the ability to browse data on a web application whilst masking the perceived complexity of XBRL*.

The PoC demonstrated an innovative processing solution for XBRL-based* datasets, which account for around 80% of the regulatory reporting data collected by the BoE. NTT DATA and Reportix created a user-friendly WebApp capable of sophisticated data analysis, enabling BoE analysts to see the data at their disposal, conduct more effective analysis, and data-driven decision-making.

Beju Shah, Head of Data Collection and Publication for the Bank of England, said: “The Bank collects and analyses a large quantity of regulatory data from financial institutions such as banks, building societies, credit unions, insurers and mortgage companies. We undertook this proof of concept with NTT Data & Reportix to explore if there is potential to reduce the cost of collecting and analysing this data. The NTT DATA and Reportix solution demonstrated it has the potential to reduce the cost of technology and data change as well as the potential to make data in a variety of formats available faster and flexibly to end users. It demonstrated certain steps traditionally carried out in solution development cycles during a project implementation would no longer be required and that it was possible to leverage the XBRL standard ‘natively’ without the need for transformation.”

Toshio Iwamoto, President and Chief Executive Officer for NTT DATA, said: “NTT DATA is honoured to join the Bank of England’s Fintech Accelerator programme, which has been promoting FinTech and RegTech. NTT DATA would like to continue to contribute to sophisticated operations in a regulator, providing innovative technologies.”

The solution has already shown there is a product that can have a significant impact on the speed at which it imports, stores, analyses and visualises regulatory data. In particular, the PoC was primarily designed to reduce technology and data change effort by at least two thirds.

Dennis Knochenwefel, Chief Executive Officer for Reportix, said: "Bank of England has shown once again to be a driving force in RegTech innovations. They are expecting three things of any solution provider: a very high pace of implementation, value creation towards the objectives of the Bank and a data model flexibility for analytics that is unheard-of. Therefore, Reportix was very excited to work together with NTT DATA and the Bank of England team because I believe we have proven to be able to meet all three expectations. That is an incredible success."

*XBRL is the de-facto global data standard for reporting of accounting, finance, tax, risk and climate change data, as well as being increasingly used for enterprise data management.