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Eliminating records risk and reducing data collection costs by up to 70%
Introduction
We led the design and delivery of a bespoke data collection platform for a major financial regulator. The work solved a records management risk and significantly reduced administrative overhead across the organisation.
The challenge
The organisation was collecting non-regulatory and additional information from firms via email and survey tools, with no consistent process for filing or retaining records. This created a real risk of data loss: emails could be deleted unless correctly identified and tagged for retention. The regulator needed a secure, scalable solution that non-technical colleagues could operate themselves, and that would integrate with existing downstream systems.
The solution
We led two development squads alongside business analysts and UX and content designers. Together we captured requirements and finalised designs aligned to the organisation's enterprise strategy. We built a bespoke platform enabling colleagues to create and manage ad hoc data collections and additional information requests without writing code. The application was built as an extension of the existing regulatory data collection platform, reusing internal and firm authentication services, and supporting a wide range of data formats including forms, documents, Excel, CSV, PowerPoint, and images. The platform was released into production on time.
The benefit delivered
Seven early adopter data collections were successfully launched, covering approximately 400 authorised firms. The time required to design and deploy new collections was significantly reduced, delivering up to 50% cost savings for complex collections involving branching logic and multiple forms, and 70% cost savings for simpler collections with fewer tasks. Reminder communications were fully automated, removing a manual overhead for business teams and saving approximately 0.5 FTE per collection per month over a typical 2–3 month cycle. Submitted data was integrated directly into the data lake and Tableau for analytics, providing real-time visibility of firm submissions and the progress of information requests.