Singapore’s central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, (MAS), and the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub have developed a new prototype platform that integrates regulatory data and analytics.
Known as Project Ellipse, the platform has successfully demonstrated how regulatory and other data, such as articles and news, can be integrated into a single platform to help regulatory authorities identify potential risks to individual banks and the banking system, MAS said in a statement.
To enable further refinement of the platform, BIS will launch an Ellipse collaboration community to share, further test, customise and scale this solution across regulatory authorities around the world.
“Regulators need accurate and timely information to assess emerging risks and to make informed supervisory decisions and Project Ellipse has now developed a potential tool for the global regulatory community to further explore and collaborate on common solutions that can improve the data and analytical capabilities of regulatory authorities,” BIS Innovation Hub's acting head Ross Leckow said.
He added that it has the potential to be a “game-changer by giving supervisors access to more and better data, structured and unstructured, with greater predictive insights than ever before."
Leckow added that it can be scaled to provide real-time analysis on a national or cross border supervisory basis.
Development process
With the support of the Bank of England, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Accenture and Financial Network Analytics, the project was undertaken in two phases, the MAS statement said.
Phase one of the project investigated how machine-executable digital reporting could enable data-driven supervision, using a cross-border common data model.
The second phase examined how advanced analytics such as machine learning and natural language processing could be applied to unstructured and granular reporting data.
This, MAS said, allows identification of risk correlations and sentiment analysis, so as to alert supervisors in real-time to issues that may need further investigation.
“Recent technological advancements have opened up possibilities for supervisors to leverage on more granular, timely and varied datasets to significantly improve supervisory effectiveness, MAS’ Deputy MD (Financial Supervision) Hern Shin Ho said.
He added that Project Ellipse “clearly demonstrates that collection and use of such datasets need not be prohibitive, but can be codified, efficient, cost-effective and potentially scalable even on a cross border basis”.
MAS is adapting the prototype for its own supervisory needs, Hern said, adding: “I hope other supervisors will similarly find it useful and look forward to further joint initiatives to develop common supervisory technology solutions for supervisors”.
