Dutch regulator De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) is planning to focus its supervision efforts on data it collects from pension funds.

On-site visits and conversations with trustees will become less important, it announced, as DNB believes the new approach will be more effective in signalling risks.

“We want to deploy our available capacity in places where we signal the largest prudential and integrity risks,” DNB said in a newsletter published on its website.

In practice this means the regulator will focus its efforts on what it perceives the largest risks that affect the financial sector.

“Our supervision will become more dynamic as we aim to respond faster to developments that affect the risk profile of supervised entities, such as pension funds. The intensity of our supervision will increase as the negative impact of these risks on confidence becomes larger,” DNB added.

Focus on data quality

Data will take centre stage in the regulator’s new approach. As a consequence, DNB promised it would “pay extra attention to the quality of the data provided to us” by pension funds.

The regulator already made this promise last year, after trade publication Pensioen Pro had found mistakes in publicly available data on DNB’s website that had been provided by pension funds.

As data becomes more important, the frequency of the regulator’s meetings with pension funds will decline, though DNB can’t yet say by how much.

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