BIS Innovation Hub, MAS Develop Supervisory Analytics Platform

The BIS Innovation Hub in Singapore and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) have developed a new prototype platform that integrates regulatory data and analytics. Known as Project Ellipse, the institutions say the platform successfully demonstrates 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.

To enable collaboration, the BIS will launch an Ellipse collaboration community to share, further test, customise and scale this solution across regulatory authorities around the world. The Ellipse prototype is the first to be published on BIS Open Tech, a new platform for sharing statistical and financial software as public goods, thereby promoting international cooperation and coordination.

With the support of the Bank of England, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Accenture and FNA, the project was undertaken in two phases, the first of which 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 allows identification of risk correlations and sentiment analysis, so as to alert supervisors in real time to issues that may need further investigation.

“Regulators need accurate and timely information to assess emerging risks and to make informed supervisory decisions,” says Ross Leckow, acting head of the BIS Innovation Hub. “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 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, it can be scaled to provide real time analysis on a national or cross border supervisory basis.”

Hern Shin Ho, deputy managing director (financial supervision) at MAS, adds, “Recent technological advancements have opened up possibilities for supervisors to leverage on more granular, timely and varied datasets to significantly improve supervisory effectiveness. 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 our own supervisory needs. I hope other supervisors will similarly find it useful and look forward to further joint initiatives to develop common SupTech solutions for supervisors.”