BST Awards 2020: Best buy-side compliance product, regulatory reporting—Kaizen Reporting

As the list of regulatory reporting requirements always expands, and seemingly never contracts, buy-side firms are feeling the pressure to keep up.

“The industry has struggled to get to grips with reporting and being able to produce high-quality data to the regulators,” says founder and CEO of Kaizen Reporting Dario Crispini.

Winning this year’s category of best buy-side compliance product for regulatory reporting, Kaizen Reporting covers all G20 regulations, like the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), Dodd–Frank, and the Markets in Financial Instruments Directives (Mifid I and II). 

“High-volume reporting obligations mean that firms have to bring together data internally from multiple sources and report in the correct way, and the regulations are becoming increasingly complex as to what you have to report,” Crispini says.

This year, Kaizen Reporting has been busy supporting clients in the lead-up to the Securities Financing Transaction Regulation (SFTR) go-live, which kicked off for sell-side firms in July and buy-side firms in October. The fourth and final phase will begin in January for non-financial entities. When it comes to large regulations like these, Crispini stresses the importance of preparing and testing long before the calendar turns over to the date of compliance.

“It’s important that firms start testing at an early stage because there is going to be remediation work required,” he says. “The sooner firms know what the issues are, it can be more cost effective for them to fix those problems at an early stage.”

The company is planning on releasing a portal called the Kaizen Hub where it can communicate with its clients and provide a range of reporting services within the hub itself. The services will be on-demand for clients and will be able to assist in day-to-day reporting obligations and investigation of transaction reports. Crispini adds the hub will start off as Mifid-focused and later move out into other regulations.