Sabrina Wilson, CPA, FLMI
Global Regulatory Policy Expert
Sabrina serves as a subject matter expert for regulatory filings at Clearwater. In this role, she works with internal teams for the ongoing enhancement of NAIC reports. Sabrina has over 20 years’ of statutory accounting and reporting experience and uses her background to communicate industry best practices and comment on regulatory guidance and procedures. She also handles complex statutory accounting and analytics questions posed by our user community.
Sabrina is a certified public accountant, has earned the designation of Fellow, Life Management Institute (FLMI), and has a master’s degree in accounting and taxation from Boise State University.
Regulatory reporting for investments is a crucial and necessary part of life for anyone with investments. But just because it’s required doesn’t mean it’s easy.
In fact, investment regulatory reporting continues to grow more complex, it changes often, and it becomes even more complicated when firms have an international presence.
In today’s regulatory environment, it’s more important than ever for investment teams to provide their internal stakeholders, clients, and auditors with complete transparency into their portfolio information, investment metrics, and data around their trading decisions. They must stay compliant with regulatory requirements, submit accurate reporting, and meet deadlines.
Institutional investors are beholden to regulations that govern how they must report their investments. These requirements are determined by regulatory bodies and groups, depending on industry and geography. For example, insurance companies follow regulatory reporting guidelines set by the SEC, NAIC, EIOPA, Solvency II, PRA, Bermuda Monetary Authority, and more.
Failure to comply with regulatory requirements can result in fines and damage a business’s reputation.
Investment teams regularly compile reports to monitor and analyze investment activity to provide insights and answers to internal stakeholders and to help with informed decision making. Regulatory reporting follows an external set of guidelines but may contain similar information to internal reports.
Having robust investment reporting in place helps ease some of the burden of investment regulatory reporting, because the data and portfolio information is more readily available.
Increased Investment Data Transparency and Accessibility
Complying with regulatory guidelines is only possible when investment data is both transparent and accessible. To provide full transparency, firms first need a comprehensive and consolidated view of their portfolios with data that is updated and reconciled each day.
Improved Compliance Monitoring
Setting up investment guidelines and using a system that provides proactive compliance monitoring is essential. Specific guidelines should be established and monitored frequently, and the right system can notify you of a violation before it goes undetected for too long.
Streamlined Operational Processes
Accounting and operations teams face the burden of keeping up with changing guidance, compiling necessary data and reports for each filing period, and ensuring compliance with new regulations.
This process can be streamlined with investment data that is aggregated, reconciled, and validated to begin with using a solution that automates these processes, like Clearwater. The Clearwater solution is also continually updated to support new regulations and to provide operations teams with the data and reporting they need.
Clearwater’s investment accounting software makes keeping up with changing regulatory reporting an easier process. Automated processes streamline data aggregation and reconciliation, so you can get your investment data sooner and know that it’s up to date and validated.
A library of configurable reports and dashboards provide visibility your investment data, from a high-level overview to granular details as needed. This same, actionable data is fed into Clearwater’s automated accounting and regulatory reports.
Clearwater is also backed by an industry-leading client services team that works with firms to understand regulatory changes and best practices for reporting with the Clearwater solution.
To learn more about industry trends and regulatory reporting for investments, schedule a meeting to speak with a Clearwater expert today.