Waters Rankings 2019: Best Reporting System Provider: Moody’s Analytics

Regulatory reporting has emerged in recent years as a critical business function that needs to be managed accurately, efficiently and transparently, even though it is an area where capital markets firms tend not to be able to leverage as a competitive differentiator. It therefore makes sense for most capital markets firms to partner with a specialist so that the bulk of the heavy lifting around regulatory interpretation, calculations, report generation, validations and updates are taken care of.

Moody’s Analytics wins its first reporting system provider category in the Waters Rankings, thanks to its Regulatory Reporting module, a single, integrated platform providing primarily sell-side firms and insurance companies with regulatory reporting support for Basel I, II, and III, as well support for the European Banking Authority, Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review, and Dodd–Frank Act Stress Tests.

“One of the key features of the solution is that we fully take care of all regulatory updates for our clients,” explains Nicolas Degruson, director of product management for regulatory reporting at Moody’s Analytics. “Each time there is a regulatory update, we deliver a new configuration file, and we strive to do that three months before the submission so that clients have time to test it and use it. We have a regulatory surveillance team that monitors 100 supervisors’ websites so that we stay up to date with regulations, and we also have a team of 10 product managers that analyze the regulatory instructions and do the specifications for the development team.”

Degruson explains that in addition to pure regulatory reporting functionality, the module also supports regulatory risk calculations, including liquidity risk and regulatory capital calculations, via a variety of formats, such as Microsoft Excel, XML and XBRL.

Past winners of this category include FactSet, which emerged top last year, while Vermilion Software, now part of the FactSet stable, won the category in 2016 and 2017. – VA