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Thanks to a generous invitation from Terrapinn, Data Coalition leadership spent nine days in Sydney and Canberra meeting leaders at the vanguard of Australia’s digital transformation.

The inaugural RegTech Data Summit’s thesis was that regulatory rules, technology, and data must be modernized in a coordinated fashion. If all three areas are modernized in tandem, new RegTech solutions will flourish, reducing reporting duplication, minimizing reporting errors, and enabling automation.

As the Data Coalition celebrated its fifth birthday, our ambitious agenda had taken hold for U.S. federal spending information - and was on its way to transforming the rest of the federal information portfolio as well. Here’s a look at our biggest data reform stories of 2017 and a glimpse of what to expect next year.

What a year it’s been so far! The Data Coalition is leading the push for the policy changes that are needed to transform government information into open data. The first half of 2017 has been jam-packed with policy and event milestones. And we’re continuing to grow our community.

On Tuesday, June 13th, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin testified before the House Appropriations Committee in defense of the Treasury Department’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 Budget request (see the request here). Mnuchin’s testimony showed an opening to standardize data fields and formats across the nation’s overlapping financial regulatory regimes - just as the Data Coalition has already been recommending to Congress.

Alex Pollock - former president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago - told the 2017 Financial Data Summit that "the time has really come" to standardize financial regulatory data.

Last week, on Feb. 2, leaders from 22 tech companies fanned out across Capitol Hill. We crossed from Senate office buildings to House, and back again. We sat down with eight members of Congress and nine groups of staffers. We walked nearly ten miles. We ended our fourteen-hour day with a well-deserved beer. To enact our wonky agenda and realize our ambitious vision, we may have to invest many more Groundhog Days. But that’s okay. With each year of the same Capitol Hill treks and similar policy chats, real change is happening.

FROM EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR HUDSON HOLLISTER: "We call on the new Trump Administration and the 115th Congress to enforce (and expand) the DATA Act, embrace a government-wide transformation of all information resources through the OPEN Government Data Act, and initiate regulatory reforms that use open data to reduce burdens, governed by the Financial Transparency Act and other reforms. I am optimistic that we will realize all three goals."

It’s been a busy year for the world’s only open data trade association! We started a new sister organization, welcomed nearly two thousand people to our events, testified before Congress, and celebrated the Senate’s passage of landmark legislation. Our members made all this possible.

The Data Coalition and seven other financial and technology organizations today sent a letter to the Financial Services Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives requesting that the committee convene a hearing on the need for regulatory agencies to modernize the way they collect information from public companies, banks, markets, and financial firms.