Beyond Regulatory Reporting: Building the Data Foundation for Post-Trade Efficiency

Rapid Addition attended and sponsored last week’s RegRisk Control Forum in London. Our CEO, Mike Powell, co-led a discussion exploring how front-office technology can extend to the middle and back office to address data challenges across regulatory reporting, risk and post-trade operations.

The discussion with Steve Cox from Monocle focused on three questions:

1. Why do firms keep paying to fix the same reporting problems?

Historically, firms focus their technology investment on revenue-generating front-office systems. Post-trade system upgrades are usually driven by necessity, such as reacting to new regulatory reporting requirements. 

The increased pace of regulation change, inconsistent interpretations between firms, and fragmented data sources create recurring work that is reactive rather than strategic. Reporting, risk, finance, surveillance and other operational functions often operate in silos and source and prepare overlapping data independently.

As data volumes grow, T+1 settlement shortens manual correction windows, and regulatory reporting scrutiny increases, the picture is unlikely to improve despite efforts such as ISDA’s Digital Regulatory Reporting initiative.

2. Is there an opportunity to turn transaction data at source into a reusable foundation for trade reporting and broader post-trade, risk and operational processes?

Front-office systems are themselves fragmented, but the technology connecting them has already solved multi-protocol interoperability and real-time enrichment while handling large data volumes in real time. Extending those capabilities downstream, combined with data governance expertise, offers a foundation for enterprise-wide reuse.

Front-office trading technology is also closer to the ‘authoritative source’ of data, i.e., trade executions, allocation instructions, cancellations and amendments and other key transactional information. Creating a real-time data transformation and enrichment layer higher up the trading lifecycle can streamline data preparation for downstream systems.

The goal is to bring transaction data into a governed flow as early as possible, then reuse it across the trade lifecycle.

3. Where should a firm start in 2027, and how does that investment pay back beyond reporting?

The industry no longer has the appetite for monolithic, multi-year projects with subjective ROI. However, creating a clear architectural vision, connecting existing systems and applications with a common real-time data layer (rather than “rip and replace”), and taking an incremental approach that adds value at each step provides a pragmatic path to simplification, cost efficiency and improved agility to respond to future change.

Such an approach can prove one workflow alongside existing systems, adding a second use case to test reuse when the capability is proven before rolling out more widely. Creating a shared data platform can reduce repeated integration and preparation, while each workflow retains its specific logic and controls, internal or third-party systems.

Critically, this cannot be a technology initiative alone. Success depends on a clear vision that understands the current state and future goals, while ensuring that technology and governance advance together. This includes agreed definitions, authoritative sources, accountable owners and traceability (both data and rules lineage), which will make reuse sustainable.