NYDFS invites digital asset firms to 'techsprint' aimed at digitizing financial reporting

The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) is bringing members of the digital asset industry together with other experts for a "techsprint" aimed at to coming up with new digital methods for these companies to submit regulatory reports.

The need for a new approach became apparent when COVID-19 pandemic caused reporting to be delayed, according to the agency. But even without the complications due to the pandemic, the NYDFS said it runs into problems manually processing periodic reports from financial institutions, it said in a statement. "The regulatory information captured sometimes suffers from data quality issues. By the time it has been reviewed, the data may be too stale to act on meaningfully."

The agency said it wants to "leverage what is learned to develop a set of common standards" in addition to "an open-source technical framework" for digital regulatory reporting.

The NYDFS is collaborating with the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and the Alliance for Innovation Regulation (AIR) for this and further techsprints, intending to focus on "other types of nonbank entities subject to financial regulation" in future programs.