Whilst working at AUSTRAC I wrote a brief about RegTech which was quite helpful. I was given permission to blog the generically useful parts of it for general consumption 🙂 Thanks Leanne!
Overview – This brief is the most important thing you will read in planning transformation! Government can’t regulate in the way we have traditionally done. Traditional approaches are too small, too slow and too ineffective. We need to explore new ways to regulate and achieve the goal of a stronger financial sector resistance to abuse that leverages data, automation, machine learning, technology and collaboration. We are here to help!
The key here is to put technology at the heart of the business strategy, rather than as simply an implementation mechanism. By embracing technology thinking, which means getting geeks into the strategy and policy rooms, we can build the foundation of a modern, responsive, agile, proactive and interactive regulator that can properly scale.
“The automation of compliance with RegTech has the potential to overcome individual foibles and human error in a way that provides the quantum leap in culture and compliance that our regulators, customers, policy makers and the community are increasingly demanding… The Holy Grail is when we start to actually write regulation and legislation in code. Imagine the productivity gains and compliance savings of instantaneous certified compliance… We are now in one of the most exciting phases in the development of FinTech since the inception of e-banking.” — Treasurer Morrison, FinTech Australia Summit, Nov 2016
On the back of the FinTech boom, there is a growth in companies focused on “RegTech” solutions and services to merge technology and regulation/compliance needs for a more 21st century approach to the problem space. It is seen as a logical next step to the FinTech boom, given the high costs and complexity of regulation in the financial sector, but the implications for the broader regulatory sector are significant. The term only started being widely used in 2015. Other governments have started exploring this space, with the UK Government investing significantly.
Core themes of RegTech can be summarised as: data; automation; security; disruption; and enabling collaboration. There is also an overall drive towards everything being closer to real-time, with new data or information informing models, responses and risk in an ongoing self-adjusting fashion.
- Data driven regulation – better monitoring, better use of available big and small data holdings to inform modelling and analysis (rather than always asking a human to give new information), assessment on the fly, shared data and modelling, trends and forecasting, data analytics for forward looking projections rather than just retrospective analysis, data driven risk and adaptive modelling, programmatic delivery of regulations (regulation as a platform).
- Automation – reporting, compliance, risk modelling of transactions to determine what should be reported as “suspicious”, system to system registration and escalation, use of machine learning and AI, a more blended approach to work combining humans and machines.
- Security – biometrics, customer checks, new approaches to KYC, digital identification and assurance, sharing of identity information for greater validation and integrity checking.
- Disruptive technologies – blockchain, cloud, machine learning, APIs, cryptography, augmented reality and crypto-currencies just to start!
- Enabling collaboration – for-profit regulation activities, regulation/compliance services and products built on the back of government rules/systems/data, access to distributed ledgers, distributed risk models and shared data/systems, broader private sector innovation on the back of regulator open data and systems.
Some useful references for the more curious:
- Treasurer Morrison’s speech to Fintech Australia
- Welcome to the new world of ‘regtech’ (AFR)
- UK Government Financial Conduct Authority have been involved in funding this space and a recent Office for Science Report has Recommendation 10 on RegTech
- UK government to build strategy on APIs
- International RegTech Companies Defining the $100b Industry (including Australia)
- 21 Hottest RegTech Startups That are Defining the Industry (UK, Ireland, USA, Switzerland, Netherlands)