Four companies will submit proposals to a rapid-phased prototyping competition (RPP) aimed at accelerating adoption of modern technological tools, the federal insurer of bank deposits announced Monday.
The tools, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), are intended to help banks draw inferences from their data and to improve data structure, portability, and processing that the agency said “may support more efficient bank-office operations and reporting.”
The four companies invited to submit pilot proposals for the project are:
- Novantas, Inc., New York, N.Y.;
- Palantir Technologies Inc., Denver, Colo.;
- PeerIQ, New York, N.Y.;
- S&P Global Market Intelligence, LLC, New York, N.Y.
The FDIC asserted that banks and other financial institutions that voluntarily choose to adopt the tools could also see benefits in reduced compliance costs and greater ability to integrate new technologies into their operations more effectively.
The agency said the tools would also help support its supervisory and financial stability missions.
The four companies prevailed among the 33 from which the FDIC said it sought prototypes of new technologies over several competitive phases. Starting a year ago, to March of this year, all of the companies met with the agency, refined their concepts, and offered demonstrations. That process whittled down the number of participants to 14 and then to 11. The four companies emerged from that stage to move to the pilot phase, the agency said.
According to the FDIC, the agency’s tech lab (FDITECH) will lead the pilot program. That will entail the companies proposing “proof of concept” for their proposed technology solutions. Those will be assessed for compliance, security, scalability, operability, and marketability, the agency said.
The pilot will be conducted with a small group of FDIC-supervised institutions – of various sizes and “technological maturities” – that voluntarily choose to participate, the FDIC said, to test the reporting technologies and determine their potential.
When the competition was formally launched in June 2020, the agency said the goal of the competition would be to help make financial reporting seamless and less burdensome for banks, provide more timely and granular data to the FDIC on industry health, and promote more efficient supervision of individual banks.
The agency dealt with one hiccup as it geared up to make the announcement: In March 2020, it issued a statement clarifying that the proposed program – once instituted – would be voluntary. The agency stated that banks were not obligated to participate in the program and wouldn’t be required to adopt the solutions or reporting systems produced.