RegTech Intelligence 
JWG analysis.
If you’re reading this post, then it’s more than likely you are in one of the many job roles that are impacted by financial regulation. Whether you are directly involved as COO or a legal, compliance, governance or risk officer, or indirectly involved in an operational, IT or business capacity, it’s clear that financial regulation continues to be one of the biggest drivers for change in our industry.
Simply managing the volume of new regulatory updates is a challenge in itself. JWG estimates that, across the G20, there are approximately 7,000 pages of regulatory text generated every month. All of that is inherently unstructured, which makes it difficult to store, manage and analyse.
The risk of missing changes, lacking controls and being non-compliant is increasingly significant, given the mounting cost of fines and legal settlements with regulators. A recent study by the London School of Economics found that ten of the top global banks – including BAML, J.P. Morgan, UBS, Citigroup, Lloyds, HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Goldman Sachs – have collectively paid out just under $150 billion in fines and regulatory settlements since the financial crisis began.
And it’s not just the quantity of regulation and the cost of non-compliance that firms are struggling with. There are also the operational implications of those regulations. Regulation is no longer a simple box ticking exercise. Regulators are taking a much more active role in trying to define business processes and best practices. That could have serious implications that go well beyond papering requirements, and stretch into risk management processes, identification standards, reporting protocols, front, middle and back-office systems and controls, along with IT testing and implementation practices.
Being able to tackle regulatory change effectively and efficiently is therefore a key requirement for any financial institution. And that means moving away from dealing with regulations as siloed compliance exercises, and moving towards a more unified approach – not only in managing regulatory compliance, but for data and operations as a whole.
Given this imperative, JWG is very happy to report that its inaugural training course held last week was a huge success.
Executives from leading firms and their suppliers, across the buy and sell-side of the industry, were taken through a comprehensive full-day session that:
- Described the regulatory players and processes and covered how data standards are created
- Articulated the operational implications of 50 regulations by category, region and timeline
- Defined a data model comprised of ‘14 continents’ for regulatory compliance.
We had resoundingly positive feedback from everyone that attended, on how they benefited from the scope of regulations covered, and gained a thorough understanding of how to build their enterprise data model to accommodate all kinds of business and regulatory drivers.
Some of the actual feedback:
- “Excellent course I would recommend to my colleagues”
- “Well managed content…I liked it”
- “I found the individual profiles for each regulation with impact assessment extremely helpful”