The volume of data that banks and other financial organisations must send off to Singapore's main regulator is about to increase substantially.

Banks and other financial bodies must provide the authorities with far heavier volumes of data, in accordance with new regulations being rolled out in coming months by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

The MAS has changed two sets of reporting rules – MAS 610 and 1003 notices. Industry practitioners say that the data points on which banks must report have exploded by 8,000% to more than 300,000 points, using 60 forms. The banks must complete these reports once a month, quarter, half-year or year. Firms must be ready to comply with the new reporting structure fully by 31 March 2020.

“The MAS is in the midst of finalising the response to the second industry consultation on the revision of MAS 610 and MAS 1003: Statistics and Returns. We plan to issue the consultation response and the revised notices by the end of April. We are sharing the finalised reporting forms ahead of the release to provide the industry with more time to finalise their systems implementation plan,” a spokesperson for MAS said.    

The regulator has consulted the banking industry in two stages about the proposed changes, taking views from lenders such as DBS and the Bank of Singapore and a slew of foreign organisations. The old reporting rules had not been update for a decade; since the 2008 financial crisis, financial centres have been under pressure to gather more data to ward off further economic collapse.

AxiomSL, the regulatory reporting business, teamed up with a raft of banks and other large financial bodies to work out ways of demonstrating compliance with the new rules. AxiomSL is co-operating with two “domestic systemically important authorised institutions” – which it has not named – and seven international banks (also unnamed), along with PricewaterhouseCoopers and BR-AG.

“We observe that more of such regulatory changes can be expected in time to come, indicating that automation is the only way to handle the growing supervisory demands and complexity in the reporting regime,” Peter Tierney, CEO Asia-Pacific, AxiomSL, said in a statement this week.