Navigating regulatory reporting change in Europe: How can financial institutions migrate with confidence?
How should financial institutions approach migration?
Across Europe, the regulatory reporting vendor landscape is changing rapidly. For banks and other financial institutions, this creates both an opportunity and a challenge: how do you migrate to the next generation of regulatory technology while ensuring compliance, operational resilience, and future scalability?
Emerging market trends
1. The regulatory reporting vendor market is consolidating
Over recent years, the European regulatory reporting vendor market has seen significant consolidation. At the same time, challengers and a number of smaller local players continue to offer alternatives.
This means that many institutions now face a market where some segments appear increasingly concentrated, vendor differentiation is becoming less obvious at first sight, and strategic vendor choice is more important than ever.
Consolidation may create stronger platforms, but it also raises questions around integration, product roadmaps, support models, pricing power, and migration strategy.
2. Not every vendor solves the same problem—even if it looks that way
At first glance, many solutions seem to offer the same thing: regulatory reporting technology. In practice, however, vendors often follow very different strategies.
Broadly speaking, the market can be grouped into three categories:
- Integrated platform players
These vendors typically offer a broader finance, treasury, risk, or ALM ecosystem, into which regulatory reporting is embedded. This can be attractive for institutions that want tighter integration between balance sheet management, liquidity, capital, and reporting processes. - Regulatory reporting specialists
These providers focus on breadth and depth of reporting coverage across multiple jurisdictions and frameworks. They often position themselves as end-to-end compliance platforms with strong content coverage and frequent regulatory updates. - Local or niche providers
These vendors focus on a specific jurisdiction or market segment and often differentiate through local expertise, tailored support, and close client relationships.
For financial institutions, this creates a difficult selection challenge. In some cases, there may effectively be only one realistic option. In others, there may be multiple credible vendors—but comparing them is rarely straightforward. It's rarely a true “apples-to-apples” comparison.
3. Regulatory change is accelerating—and vendors are under pressure too
A third major trend is the pace and frequency of regulatory change.
Across prudential reporting, resolution, tax-related reporting, granular data requirements, and local supervisory demands, the pressure on vendors is constant. New rules, updated taxonomies, validation changes, and late adjustments mean vendors must continuously adapt their solutions to remain compliant.
For institutions, this means vendor selection is no longer just about functionality. It's also about speed of regulatory interpretation, ability to incorporate change quickly, transparency of updates, quality of testing, and confidence that the output will stand up to regulatory scrutiny.
The question is no longer simply: does the tool support reporting? It's increasingly: how fast, reliably, and defensibly can it adapt?
4. AI is changing the game—agility matters more than perfection
Artificial intelligence is adding another layer of disruption.
The future of regulatory reporting won’t necessarily belong to the vendor with the most static or perfect toolset. It’ll belong to those with the greatest agility: the ability to adapt quickly, automate intelligently, and combine technology with sound regulatory interpretation.
AI can become a powerful catalyst across the regulatory reporting chain. For example by helping to:
accelerate data transformation between source systems,
improve mapping across fragmented architectures,
translate regulatory content into structured datasets,
detect anomalies or inconsistencies earlier, and/or
support impact assessments when regulations change.
But AI alone isn't enough. In regulatory reporting, outcomes still need to be explainable, controlled, and defensible. The real differentiator is the ability to strike the right balance between artificial intelligence and human intelligence to create a superior reporting environment.
5. The cost of change is becoming a strategic issue
The market is also facing a structural economic challenge: the cost of change.
In a relatively saturated market, most financial institutions already have a reporting vendor in place. Growth for vendors increasingly depends on replacing incumbent providers or expanding their footprint within existing clients. At the same time, they need to modernise their own technology stack and keep up with regulatory and data demands.
For institutions, this creates a different but equally important question: how do you modernise without triggering unnecessary cost, delivery risk, or disruption?
Migration isn't just a technology exercise. It's a strategic transformation involving:
regulatory interpretation,
data lineage,
operating model redesign,
governance,
testing and validation, and
change management across finance, risk, and compliance.
6. IReF will raise the bar further
With the European Central Bank’s (ECB) Integrated Reporting Framework (IReF) moving forward, the direction of travel is clear: regulatory reporting is increasingly becoming a data challenge first and a tooling challenge second.
The institutions and vendors that succeed will be those that can process data quickly and accurately, apply analytics effectively, maintain high data quality, and generate correct outcomes consistently across evolving requirements.
In that context, the key question becomes: how do you ensure that your target-state reporting outcome isn't just faster—but also correct, explainable, and future-ready?
How PwC can help
At PwC, we support financial institutions across vendor selection, migration, validation, and broader regulatory readiness.
1. Independent validation across vendors
PwC’s regulatory insights capabilities include validation tools based on XBRL taxonomies that can independently assess consistency and quality, regardless of which vendor generated the XBRL output.
This means that whether you are migrating within the same vendor stack, moving from one vendor to another, or validating your current reporting output, you can gain independent comfort before submitting your data to the regulator.
2. Deep regulatory expertise
PwC combines technology knowledge with regulatory expertise. Our specialists understand how regulation is formed, how supervisory expectations evolve, and what regulators focus on in practice.
Because we have supported institutions through reviews, inspections, and remediation programmes, we know that success isn't only about implementing the rulebook—it's about anticipating scrutiny.
3. Future-readiness beyond the immediate reporting scope
PwC doesn't only focus on today’s reporting needs. We help institutions assess readiness for the broader regulatory agenda, including EBA and ECB requirements, IReF, granular data initiatives, and local supervisory overlays, as well as prudential, resolution, and tax-related reporting.
In other words, we help clients not only solve the current reporting problem but also prepare for what comes next.
4. Vendor selection and implementation
PwC maintains strong relationships across the regulatory reporting vendor landscape. We see these vendors as valuable ecosystem partners with whom we continuously exchange market insights, regulatory perspectives, and implementation experience. This gives us a strong understanding of how different providers are responding to regulatory change from a technology perspective, enabling us to form an independent view of which solutions are best suited to our clients’ needs.
In practice, this means we support financial institutions through the full review, selection, and implementation journey, which typically covers the following steps:
5. End-to-end view of the regulatory workflow
With comprehensive expertise in AI, data, Python-based solutions, and regulatory transformation, PwC can assess the full reporting flow—both upstream and downstream of the reporting vendor itself. That includes the interfaces between source systems, finance, risk, compliance, data management, and reporting operations.
Because in many cases, the real challenge isn't the vendor tool alone—it's the broader ecosystem around it.
A strategic moment for financial institutions
Vendor consolidation, technology renewal, regulatory acceleration, and AI-driven transformation are reshaping the regulatory reporting market.
For financial institutions, this is the moment to ask:
Do we need a second opinion on our current setup?
Are we selecting the right next-generation vendor?
Are we ready for future regulatory demands, such as IReF?
Can we trust the quality and consistency of our reporting outputs during and after migration?
These aren't just implementation questions. They’re strategic questions.
Whether you’re selecting a new vendor, validating your current reporting landscape, or assessing your regulatory readiness, PwC can provide independent expertise as you navigate the changes to regulatory reporting.
For more information, contact external advisor Jeroen Van Doorsselaere. With over 20 years in financial services software focused on finance, risk, and regulatory reporting, he specializes in applying modern technologies to streamline business processes and reporting.
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Jeroen Van Doorsselaere
