The growing market for regulation technology (regtech)—tools that help attorneys better understand and comply with various industry-specific laws—just got a new major player. Technology company IBM has entered the fold, aiming to leverage its artificial intelligence (AI) engine Watson in regulatory technology designed specifically for the financial industry.

At the “How Cognitive Computing and IBM Watson are Poised to Radically Transform RegTech” session of the 2017 ABA New York annual meeting in New York, speakers from IBM and the financial industry discussed the company's development efforts, still in its initial stages.

Richard Ma, director of regulatory compliance offerings at IBM, said the company is leveraging Watson's machine-learning abilities to train software to read and understand a variety of regulatory data sources covering federal, state and international laws. He said that by the end of this year, IBM will be at 200 data sources” ingested into Watson, adding that the number of data sources is expected to rise in 2018.