Regulatory technology: innovating compliance and your business

Regulatory compliance issues are some of the most labor-intensive and complex that organizations face. Effective management of ongoing regulatory impacts and reducing compliance costs is top-of-mind. Companies want to drive strategic growth while effectively and efficiently meeting regulatory compliance obligations. Regulatory (RegTech) or regulatory compliance automation helps to both innovate front and back-office compliance activities, while driving business operations.

Compliance costs continue to rise due to the complexity of local, state, federal and global regulations. As these costs increase and technology advances, companies seek more powerful technology solutions and more agile and automated processes to enhance customer service and to develop new products and services at a faster pace.  

Companies can use RegTech across such areas as regulatory inventories and regulatory change processes, compliance risk assessment, monitoring and surveillance, data analytics (including the analysis of risk data) and reporting. By using new technologies such as cognitive computing and machine learning, RegTech solutions can better automate processes and workflow while also organizing and finding meaningful patterns in the volumes of accessible data. This can ultimately enable better insights into regulatory practices, automating complex reporting and conducting meaningful analyses of critical compliance risk areas.

There is a significant strategic opportunity for organizations to better connect their IT and automation strategy with solid compliance and risk management requirements and controls. This is evident from the results of a recent KPMG survey of chief compliance officers from 62 major U.S. companies, which found that only 4 out of 10 reported that their technology infrastructure has been analyzed to confirm it aligns with compliance requirements and that significant gaps have been addressed. 

Many discussions of the importance of RegTech focus on its ability to answer immediate business needs, drive operational efficiencies and reduce costs in regulatory compliance and risk management. While many companies are already transforming their legacy technology systems, RegTech solutions implemented in key areas can have a further transformative impact on an organization’s technological readiness.

The benefits that RegTech can bring are clear: not only can these technologies help streamline, simplify and optimize the business processes required to meet regulatory standards and reduce associated costs, but also provide critical support for business growth, improve customer service delivery, and help organizations introduce new products and services to the market more quickly.