Banking, Financial Services & Insurance
Transforming Bulgaria’s Financial Supervision With a Unified Digital System
Success Story
The Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission tasked Scalefocus with modernizing its fragmented IT infrastructure through the development of a Unified Information System (UIS). The new system replaced outdated, manual processes with fully digital services. It integrated multiple internal and external systems, including key European supervisory authorities, ensuring real-time data sharing and improved regulatory compliance. The project significantly increased operational efficiency and reduced administrative burden. The UIS represents a significant step toward a modern and transparent financial regulatory environment in Bulgaria.
Streamlined operations with a unified system
End-to-end digital
client servicing
Improved data accuracy and compliance
The Client
Our client is the Bulgarian Financial Supervision Commission (FSC), the national regulator of Bulgaria’s non-banking sector, which covers the pension, insurance, and capital markets. The FSC’s mission is to guarantee transparency and proper market functioning while protecting the interests of citizens and businesses. Beyond its domestic role, the Commission enforces EU-wide regulatory directives such as DORA and GDPR, keeping the country aligned with European standards. It also plays a central role in regulation, oversight, and driving compliance across Bulgaria’s economy.
The Challenge
Following its establishment in the early 2000s, the Financial Supervision Commission’s IT landscape was highly fragmented. This created a lot of administrative burden, slowed down internal processes, and made it difficult to deliver timely and transparent supervision services. The lack of system integration led to duplicated efforts, inconsistent data across public registers, and limited capacity for real-time collaboration with European regulatory authorities.
Additionally, the Commission had not yet transitioned to digital administrative services, which made it challenging to meet the rising expectations of a digital-first society, especially as its infrastructure remained outdated and fragmented. Many of the FSC’s existing systems consisted of standalone modules developed by different vendors, resulting in an inefficient IT environment.
Recognizing the operational challenges all of this posed, the FSC set out to consolidate its digital infrastructure into a single, unified framework. This effort took shape through the Establishment of a Single Information System (UIS) project, co-financed by the European Union.
Through the development of the UIS, the FSC aimed to streamline service delivery and ensure real-time integration with European supervisory authorities such as the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) and the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). The goal was to reduce administrative burden by fully digitalizing its services, while also enhancing the speed, quality, and transparency of its supervisory activities.
The Solution
To address the long-standing fragmentation of its IT systems and accelerate digital transformation, the FSC chose Scalefocus as its end-to-end technology provider for the development of the Unified Information System (UIS). The Commission also sought to align with Bulgaria’s broader e-government strategy and move away from paper-based processes toward fully digital administrative services.
Scalefocus led the digitalization of the UIS as a large-scale program, covering every stage from architecture and development to deployment and integration. Our multidisciplinary team included solution architects, backend and frontend engineers (primarily in Java), database experts, DevOps specialists, and professionals in business analysis, project coordination, and project management.
Previously, services such as license issuance, company information updates, and regulatory reporting required applicants to visit the Commission in person or mail in physical forms — a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. The UIS replaced these outdated practices with a centralized digital platform that now handles all internal and external documents and supports digital signing and stamping, ensuring both efficiency and legal compliance.
We developed an external portal for citizens, legal entities, and regulated organizations, and an internal portal that unified the FSC’s previously disjointed software solutions. We also redesigned the Commission’s entire database architecture, migrating data from multiple legacy sources such as Excel files, XML, XBRL formats, and standalone databases. A built-in task management module ties workflows together, automatically creating tasks, setting deadlines, and routing them to the appropriate experts across the institution.
The UIS introduced extensive integration capabilities, structured around three categories:
- Horizontal integrations with national systems, including the Trade Register, Bulstat, Bulgarian National Bank, Sofia Stock Exchange, and Central Depository, plus inter-registry connectivity through RegiX, Bulgaria’s government data-exchange platform.
- European-level integrations linking the FSC with EU regulators such as ESMA, EIOPA, and the EBA. Through these connections, the FSC can transmit structured reports directly to European supervisors in real time.
- Internal integrations with the FSC’s HR, accounting, and directory services, along with legacy applications that remained part of the IT environment.
Finally, the digital services themselves were built to be easily extendable. New features can be configured rather than custom-developed, which allowed the rapid creation of more than 300 digital services in a short timeframe. This flexibility ensures the UIS will continue evolving with future regulatory requirements.
The Results
The Establishment of a Unified Information System (UIS) project was a foundational step in modernizing Bulgaria’s financial regulatory infrastructure. As a result of our work on it, the Financial Supervision Commission serves citizens, businesses, and European stakeholders more effectively and makes processes transparent and easier to access digitally.
By building the regulator’s own systems, we solved complex business and functional challenges while demonstrating Scalefocus’s ability to deliver solutions that define compliance standards. The UIS unified the Commission’s three supervisory divisions—insurance, pensions, and capital markets—into a single platform, enabling electronic client servicing and faster processing.
The new system improved data management by gathering, validating, transforming, and structuring information efficiently. This increased operational efficiency, enhanced control mechanisms, reduced paper use with associated cost savings, and improved ESG compliance. In a broader context, implementing the advanced information system enhances government oversight and streamlines operations. The result is a centralized solution that brings long-term value not just to the Commission, but to society as a whole.
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