RegTech Intelligence 
JWG analysis.
For the past decade we have been making sense of the changes regulators want to make … and it’s not been easy. JWG has worked with over 100 financial institutions, dozens of trade associations and regulators in several countries to mirror the detailed compliance requirements specified by the regulatory agenda to help define what ‘good looks like’.
Despite the support we’ve received from middle and back-office professionals over the years, when the crisis hit, we nearly packed it in. Instead, we decided to scale up what we do. And now YOU can take advantage of our initiative to make your regulatory life easier, simpler and cheaper. Just in time …
The tracking game
The G20 is a loosely knit body. It pulls together a plethora of international, regional and local oversight bodies, standards setters, policy makers and regulators of many shapes and sizes. To track their change requests, one needs to understand scores of regulatory agendas, how they interrelate and what results they are trying to achieve and by when. And be aware of the consequences of not getting it done on time.
Every day we scan hundreds of websites for documents which describe the ‘deltas’ that will affect the way we do business in Financial Services. We track the political, legal and rulemaking landscape against announced (and implied) plans and validate the impact of the deltas with trusted experts in our network. Thanks to social media, this year we have heatmaps from 50+ groups across 120 countries, all tracking their own specific agendas.
As readers of our daily alerts and 20+ published articles a month can attest, we map the market intelligence, syndicate the findings and get views from the regulators themselves as to what they are likely to do about it. It’s a challenging game, but we like to think we play it pretty well.
The EU’s agenda in context
Following the ‘Super Tuesday’ reforms passed by the European Parliament before they went to the polls, we stepped back and looked at the holistic impact.
We knew that implementation of the G20 regulatory agenda would extend through 2016, but the current 2,300+ pages and EC press statements suggest that many of these initiatives are themselves up for review in 2017 and beyond. The ‘helicopter view’ below gives you a sense of how big this change programme really is.
In addition, recent changes within the European Parliament may alter the accepted landscape as there are potential pitfalls for legislation that has already passed. For example, the definition of instruments, including FX, is open for discussion in Brussels. The outcome of the debate could have big implications – not only for new rules like benchmarks and the financial transaction tax, but also for largely complete rules like EMIR.
The bottom line is that regulatory reform will continue well past the end of the decade and, even at this late stage of the reform cycle, the industry is poorly prepared to rise to the challenge.
Do you know what it means for your business?
Lawyers, accountants, consultants and suppliers pick off pieces of the agenda, but they don’t spend all their time trying to ingest it and rationalise how it all fits together. So the questions become: How do you know you have the right regulatory picture. Have you analysed it correctly? Are you doing the right things about it?
Since 2009 the industry has processed 300,000+ pages of regulatory reform and the specialists are exhausted. They started with the liquidity wars, dodged budget cuts to attack the capital front, bounced over to shore up the financial crime trenches just in time for the 2011 OTC push across the globe. It’s a truly cross-disciplinary exercise: regulatory, legal, finance, risk, operations, data and technology all have a role to play.
They can just about rally for assault on MiFID II next year but, if you are expecting your highly specialised experts to have much spare time to tell everyone else what is happening, what it could mean, the risks to your firm and what you should do about them … think again.
The mass of unstructured regulatory data is hard to store, manage, analyse and retrieve, As such, the risk to business of missing changes, lacking controls and becoming non-compliant is significant. Fines, levies and the associated resource costs can be considerable – but the reputational damage could be even greater …
It’s a good thing that we decided to use innovative technology to change the game three years ago. As attendees of our CDMG meetings for the past 3 months know, we have a new tool to help in the information warfare.
Last week we issued a ‘top secret’ warning as we turned on the public face of our innovative RegDelta data management platform. Following a great response, we felt obligated to share a bit more about it in the public domain. Take a look at RegDelta.com or, better yet, get your name on the list for Thursday’s CDMG meeting where you can see it in action helping with the MiFID assault.
