Compliance rules law regulation policy business technology.

 

Those at the cutting edge of the technology industry face a daunting task in complying with new and changing regulations, but such a challenge is far from new. In the heavily regulated financial industry, for instance, enterprises have always had to keep pace with quickly evolving rules that define how they operate.

Nasdaq BWise, however, is looking to make the task of complying with new regulations more automated through launching its BWise Regulatory Change Management tool. Though not the first ever such regulation management tool, BWise claims its solution is far more robust than anything offered to date.

What it is: BWise Regulatory Change Management is a regulation research and management tool for banks and financial institutions. The solution pulls data from over 330 global regulators to provide regulatory explanations and rule updates in real-time. It also allows users to track rules issued by certain regulators, or in certain jurisdictions, and set alerts about upcoming changes.

How it works: BWise Regulatory Change Management offers “augmented regulatory content,” which it defines as content that has been explained in simple terms by expert human reviewers.

“There are people that are reading these rules, and with their jurisdictional knowledge they will add human interpretation, explaining what it actually means and what a bank needs to comply with,” said Anton Lissone, chief technology officer at Nasdaq BWise.

This interpretation will include impact assessments, which looks at what internal policies the regulatory change will affect and what controls may be needed in-house for compliance. Once alerted to a regulatory change, a company's compliance team, such as its legal department, can send out notifications via the solution to different departments or offices that need to be aware of the change.

These departments and offices can then “look at their own policies and see if the existing policies and controls already cover the regulator obligation,” Lissone said. “If not, they can figure out what needs to happen and document their regulatory actions.”

BWise Regulatory Change Management allows one to track the progress of complying with rule changes through creating reports that document the rule change deadline and any actions taken by specific departments or offices. A company's compliance team can use the reports to inform “the C-suite about the status of regulatory compliance,” Lissone said.

AI future? For now, all content within the solution is interpreted and explained by human reviewers. But Nasdaq BWise is hoping to change that in the future, as the company is looking at using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to automatically provide information on a certain regulatory changes.

The AI would work by statistically analyzing large data sets documenting how companies are responding to a regulatory change and how regulators are enforcing the change. From there, it would determine the best controls a company should have in place to comply with the change, and to what extent regulators are actively enforcing the rule.

“If you can capture how often regulators give sanctions for fines about a particular rule, that says something about the activity of the regulator, and which people are actually following that rule,” Lissone said.

Competition: Two of BWise's biggest competitors in the regulatory management space are Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, which offer similar solutions that help companies track and comply with regulatory changes.

But Lissone believes that the BWise solution stands out for a number of reasons. For one, “there a lot of the stuff that the regulators publish that is less relevant—they are just notices and things that don't require you to take action. We filter out all the things that are not important,” he said.

What's more, he believes BWise also stands out because it tracks changes in non-U.S. regulations as well and translates them into English for its users.