An insurer must submit regulatory reports whose format and content change periodically. How should the pipeline be designed?

The design

A stable internal model with a mapping layer per regulator and per report version.

The facts do not change when a format does. Putting a mapping between the internal model and each report means a format change is a configuration change rather than a domain change — and formats change while the underlying business does not.

What the pipeline must guarantee

• Reproducibility. The same report must be regeneratable from the same period's data at any later date and produce the same output. That requires the inputs as they were, not as they are now — which means the data model must support point-in-time reconstruction rather than only current state.
• Effective-dated rules, since a report covering a past period must apply the rules that were in force then. A system that cannot express "governed by the rules as at its date" requires a data migration for every regulatory change, which is the actual source of the disruption teams attribute to regulation.
• Auditability of every figure, so a challenged number can be traced to its inputs and the calculation shown. "The system computed it" is not an answer.
• A reconciliation between the report and the source systems, since a report that does not tie back is one nobody can defend.
• Retention of the submitted artefact, not just the ability to regenerate it — because what was submitted is the record.

The failure that recurs

A report generated from current data for a past period. Values have changed since — a claim reopened, a policy amended, a correction applied — and the regenerated report differs from the submitted one with no explanation available.

That is a finding, and it is prevented only by point-in-time reconstruction being a designed capability rather than an assumption.

The organisational half

Compliance in the design conversation rather than reviewing afterwards. A reporting requirement discovered in month five does not adjust a design, it replaces one — and the cost of that discovery vastly exceeds the cost of the earlier conversation.

And a named owner per report, since a report with no owner is one that is regenerated by whoever is available, in a way nobody can explain when it is challenged.