RegTech Intelligence You may have noticed that we snuck out a complete refresh of our websites this week. The revamped pages bring our thought leadership and technology offerings together for the first time. After 1,000,000+ page views from 190 countries since 2012, this was a big migration. Why do it now?
Well, as readers of these pages are well aware, late 2017 and early 2018 were testing times for financial institutions as a mass of regulations, from MiFID II to GDPR and PSD II, were being implemented. But as buy-side and sell-side firms came up for air and breathed a collective sigh of relief this summer, the compliance discourse has changed radically.
JWG has seen an influx of requests for AI-powered natural language processing technology to help humans make better compliance decisions. Our RegDelta system’s flexibility and unique architecture allow us to serve client needs across this spectrum, from simple intake and triage use cases to deeper integration supporting end-to-end policy control integration. Of course, we are also extremely busy with more collaborative mapping of the heatmap for the next round of reforms being implanted next year (e.g., SFTR, EMIR REFIT, AMLD V) not to mention Brexit and Lexit! In sum, we have a very busy 18 months ahead.
This surge in demand is the result of multiple converging trends; compliance teams are under pressure to regain control of the sprawling compliance machine they built up to early 2018; senior management, now held personally accountable by regulators in several jurisdictions, are challenging firms to demonstrate the lineage of their policies and controls; and supervisors are looking for evidence that firms understand how to produce compliant outcomes and can trace problems to their source.
Meanwhile, we are increasingly hearing from more of a variety of client stakeholders than we used to, each of whom bring a different perspective to RegTech than Banks’ Risk and Compliance teams did – from strategy departments looking to RegTech as a source of competitive advantage to innovation units with targets to test new technology. UK firms are even having RegTech conversations with their auditors, as recent FRC guidance is challenging those to show how they take stock of clients’ compliance risks and feed their findings back into their audit.
JWG’s management has recognised this upturn in demand as an inflection point in our growth trajectory. Therefore, JWG has turned its attention to what we need in order to support rapid growth. We have considered our future from the ground up, from money and people through to products and technology.
We have over a dozen new conversations with senior budget holders underway about helping sell-side and buy-side firms and their suppliers regain control over their compliance programmes now. This is helping us shape the roadmap for both the data and the system needs of more sophisticated users.
Some of these conversations you will have already seen in the news as we recently announced a partnership with BMO Capital Markets (BMO), providing them with access to RegDelta and an opportunity to feed into our Roadmap of new functionality.
But there is a lot more happening behind the scenes and, to that end, we will shortly be launching a crowdfunding campaign on CrowdCube, inviting our community of users and subject matter experts, as well as the general public, to become part of the JWG and RegDelta story. It is not often that investors get a chance to buy into a self-sustaining innovative firm like ours, so we anticipate significant demand – so stay tuned and please contact pj@jwg-it.eu if you would like to discuss your participation.