From twelve days to three: automating regulatory reporting

The situation

Every quarter, a team of twenty spent nearly two weeks assembling regulatory returns from spreadsheets. Errors were caught late, and the regulator had started to notice.

What we did

1. Traced every reported figure back to its source system.
2. Replaced spreadsheet steps with controlled, tested data pipelines.
3. Gave finance a single view of exceptions instead of a folder of files.

What changed

• 12 days to 3 for the quarterly reporting cycle
• 80% fewer manual adjustments
• Full lineage for every reported figure

The lesson

Most reporting problems are data problems that only surface at the end of the quarter.