There are complex reports that every European-regulated finance entity needs to submit to their regulator. They are always complicated, but they are only sometimes well-specified. The formats evolve over time.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.