RegTech Intelligence 
Collaboration is hard, yet it’s the core of meeting every new regulatory requirement.
Last week, the Royal Bank of Scotland received the prestigious ‘best use of IT for the purposes of risk/regulatory management’ award because they got the way they manage trade and transaction reporting obligations right. Many leading technologists helped JWG’s RegDelta platform underpin the effort.
Claire Hussey, Head of Middle Office and Supervisory Technology at Royal Bank of Scotland, said, “This is an innovative way for us to manage our compliance with regulatory rules. We hope this will lead the way in providing a standardised and mutualised approach to regulatory rules interpretation across the financial services industry. Our operations and technology teams are thrilled to be recognised by this award.”
What did they do? They collaborated with JWG and GFT to deploy RegDelta as the foundation for a standard set of interpretations to inform business requirements documents for over 50 regulatory reporting regimes. This means that they aren’t just throwing bodies at the EMIR, MiFID and other trade and transaction reporting problems, they have thought through a solution.
Amongst the other award winners were Credit Suisse (Best use of IT in investment banking), Goldman Sachs (Best cyber security initiative), UBS (Best use of mobile technology in financial services) and J.P. Morgan (Best institutional infrastructure initiative). For the full list of award winners, click here.
As we have previously noted, getting business, legal, change and operations, data and IT tribes to work together in defining their interpretation of regulation is no small task. JWG’s Managing Director, Blythe Barber, noted that “Senior management saw two distinct choices ahead of them: either kick off a series of ongoing and siloed governance risk and compliance (GRC) projects for the foreseeable future; or leverage a state-of-the-art regulatory data platform to create a new way of managing regulatory reporting obligations.”
RegDelta is the world’s first regulatory change management platform that allows firms to analyse and maintain a golden source of all their regulatory obligations. It empowers the enterprise to assess the impact of every clause, assign the right actions and track the status. Tracing decisions and storing documentation to provide a robust corporate memory, it provides powerful change management workflow and reporting that are unavailable on other platforms.
Gareth Richardson, Managing Director GFT UK, said, “We are delighted to have been chosen by the client to deliver this project from amongst a very competitive field. Our experienced team of regulatory specialists have established the tooling, operating model and governance to provide a complete ‘end-to-end’ solution to the complex regulatory control challenges faced by the financial community. In a world of continual regulatory change that is commonly recognised as the new normal”.
Scott Mullins, Head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development at Amazon Web Services, said, “Financial institutions of all sizes across the globe are adopting the AWS Cloud, and, as they do so, addressing regulatory compliance obligations is our top priority. We’re excited to see a next generation GRC tool like RegDelta leverage AWS to deliver a secure, highly scalable, compliance solution that provides actionable regulatory insights in timeframes that are much quicker than typical deployments – days rather than quarters.”
Ian Dwyer, Director, UK Alliance Channels at MarkLogic, said, “We are delighted to see RegDelta is receiving the recognition it deserves. Because RegDelta is built on the MarkLogic database, it is quick to deploy, powerful, easy to maintain and highly secure. RegDelta has changed the way that regulatory change is managed.”
Jeremy Bentley, CEO Smartlogic, says, “RegDelta’s ontology is quickly becoming industry standard RDF-designed to readily accommodate the entire spectrum of FS regulations”
Sam Herbert, Client Services Director at 67 Bricks, says, “Our experience in developing enriched content digital products in the publishing arena proved critical to overcoming the fast-paced and demanding requirements for managing regulatory change.”
Between 2009 and 2014, global regulators levied more than USD 260 billion in fines and there are more regulatory obligations emerging every day.
The Banking Technology prize in question was created 4 years ago to recognise the role that FinTech plays in helping to demystify the requirements and define innovative solutions. David Bannister, editor of Banking Technology, said that this year “More than a dozen entries for this category were whittled down to a shortlist that included Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs and HSBC this year. We are very pleased to have been able to recognise RBS’ efforts as outstanding in a very tough field.”
The great news is that RegDelta is ready to take on far more than reporting. We have teams working on the entirety of MiFID II and all its interdependent regulations, as well as financial crime and all the regulations affecting the KYC arena. For more information, please contact regdelta@jwg-it.eu or visit www.regdelta.com.