• Regulatory Reporting - Assumptions & Interpretations

    Preparing regulatory returns is rarely a straightforward task. Despite extensive guidance from the PRA and EBA, many reporting areas require you to apply judgement, interpret rules, and make firm-specific assumptions, especially when aligning regulatory templates with internal data, accounting treatments, or legacy systems.

    Poorly governed or undocumented assumptions can lead to inconsistencies, weaken supervisory confidence, and raise red flags during reviews or inspections. Regulators now expect firms to explain how they’ve formed key judgements, applied interpretations, and ensured consistency across reporting cycles.

    At Katalysys, we help you take control of these complexities. We work with your team to identify, validate, document, and govern the assumptions and interpretations embedded within your regulatory returns, so you can report with confidence, defend your positions, and respond effectively to supervisory scrutiny.

Key activities

Many of the most material risks in regulatory reporting stem not from data errors, but from interpretation gaps and assumptions made without full oversight or documentation. Whether you’re defining materiality thresholds, classifying exposures, or mapping product features to templates, you are making decisions that directly affect your capital, liquidity, funding and other risk positions.

Supervisors expect you to manage these areas through structured governance, documented rationale, and repeatable processes, not informal judgement calls. We help you transform these high-risk areas into controlled, transparent, and auditable decisions.

  • We start by identifying and cataloguing the critical assumptions, manual interventions, and reporting judgements across your regulatory submissions, such as COREP, FINREP, PRA110, BoE Statistical, IRRBB, and ALMM. We work with your finance, risk, and reporting teams to trace how and where decisions are being made.

  • We test the rationale behind your assumptions and assess how well they align with regulatory expectations. We highlight inconsistencies, confirm alignment with internal data and accounting treatments, and help refine interpretations where needed.

  • We formalise your judgements and interpretations in a structured, auditable format. We build or enhance your Regulatory Reporting Judgement, Interpretation and Assumpotions document(s) to ensure each assumption is supported by documented reasoning, ownership, data sources, and governance sign-offs.

  • We help you put the right controls in place, setting thresholds for escalation, defining review cycles, and embedding assumption governance into your existing reporting committees or sign-off forums.

  • We support you in responding to regulator queries or preparing for a Skilled Person Review. We help you evidence your interpretations, walk through your assumptions with confidence, and demonstrate good practice to supervisors or auditors.

What we offer

  • End-to-end documentation

    End-to-end documentation

    We help you build a comprehensive, centralised judgements, assumptions & interpretations document(s) that serves as a single point of truth, ready for internal audit or regulatory challenge - for every single regulatory return/form at a very granular level, for each row and column. We identify where key decisions are made across your regulatory reporting suite and assess their materiality, consistency, and control environment.

  • Governance and control review

    Governance and control review

    We evaluate how you govern and approve assumptions, testing whether they’re well understood, regularly reviewed, and aligned with external rules and internal standards.

  • Advisory on emerging issues

    Advisory on emerging issues

    When new rules or scenarios emerge, we provide expert input to help you select, justify, and document your reporting approach, ensuring your decisions hold up under scrutiny and are in line with industry best practices.

Let’s get started

Interested in learning more about how we can support your bank? Whether you have specific requirements or just want to explore our services further, we’re here to help. Please feel free to contact us, and one of our experts will get in touch to discuss your needs and how we can assist

We look forward to working with you!

Why choose us

  • We understand the reporting standards in detail, from COREP and FINREP to PRA110 and leverage. We bring sharp, practical insight into how judgements and interpretations affect your capital and liquidity profile.

  • We’ve supported UK banks through supervisory feedback, internal audit findings, and remediation programmes tied to reporting assumptions. We know how to make your governance credible and your documentation stand up to review.

  • We deliver clear, actionable documents that you can integrate into your existing processes. Our work ensures your assumptions are no longer ad hoc, they’re documented, defensible, and reviewed.

  • We tailor our services to fit your size and complexity. Whether you need a complete review or support for specific high-risk areas, we scale our approach to your needs.

  • With our support, your reporting team, senior management, and board can speak confidently about the assumptions behind your numbers, and demonstrate that you’ve applied sound judgement, with clear governance every step of the way.

What are we talking about