Second Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), Elsie Addo Awadzi, has said that the financial services landscape around the world continues to undergo rapid transformation, with constantly changing business models and delivery mechanisms, blurring traditional boundary lines around and across the regulatory perimeter.
Supervisory authorities, she said, are stepping up to the opportunities and risks presented by emerging technologies and are increasingly enhancing their own capabilities to
improve effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability in supervision.
As a regulatory and supervisory authority for banks and a range of other financial institutions, she stated, “the Bank of Ghana has over the years invested in various technological tools to support its prudential, market conduct, and AML/CFT supervisory functions.”
An example was the adoption of the Electronic Financial Analysis and Surveillance
System (eFASS) in 2007–2008, providing an electronic portal for financial institutions
to submit prudential returns, she said.
While the eFASS tool helped somewhat, it had its limitations, including the rigidity of the system to accommodate the addition of newly licensed institutions, the inability to modify existing returns, add new returns, or generate ad-hoc reports and trend analyses, thereby limiting the system’s effectiveness after a few short years, Madam Addo Wadzi further stated.
In addition to the above challenges with eFASS, while managing a systemic banking crisis in 2017 through 2019, the Bank of Ghana identified widespread data integrity problems in several failed banks, savings and loans companies, and microfinance institutions. Following the resolution of these failed institutions, the Bank of Ghana deemed it critical to address the weaknesses and limitations in the eFASS supervisory tool and set out on a comprehensive study of Suptech models in use in advanced economies as well as in emerging and developing economies.
“This eventually led to the design and implementation of a new Suptech tool from 2019
through 2022, that became known as the Online Regulatory Analytic Surveillance System (ORASS),” she said in an address during the Cambridge Suptech week 2023 celebration.