Paradigm shift in financial services regulatory compliance
The compliance landscape has changed rapidly and dramatically over the past 15 years, with the volume and complexity of new regulations rising unabated. Financial institutions have strained to keep pace with the onslaught of legislative and regulatory changes that arose in response to improper business practices and criminal activity. These changes caused the erosion of public confidence in global credit and financial markets and in the security of our banking system.
After the financial crisis of 2008, there was a sharp increase in enforcement actions brought by federal and state regulators in a broad range of cases involving financial and securities fraud, economic sanctions violations, money laundering, bribery, corruption, market manipulation, and tax evasion, leading to violations of the Bank Secrecy Act and OFAC sanctions1 According to Forbes, Inc., aggregate fines paid by the largest global banks from 2008 through August 2014 exceeded USD 250 billion. A February 2016 report issued by Bloomberg revealed that the toll on foreign banks since the 2008 crisis has been colossal with 100,000 jobs lost, USD 63 billion in fines and penalties, and a staggering USD 420 billion dollar loss in market capitalization.
In the wake of these enforcement actions and record-breaking penalties, financial institutions are under pressure to
- rethink,
- restructure,
- and retool
their risk and compliance function to operate in the current environment. With regulators, investors and boards demanding increased global transparency, risk and compliance can no longer be tackled in geographical silos. Transforming the way compliance departments operate to meet the new reality requires an investment in talent and technology.
Spending on talent continues to rise as institutions hire more and more staff to shore up already sizeable compliance teams. At the end of 2014, Citigroup reported a compliance staff of 30,000. Some boards, analysts, and investors question the exploding costs of compliance yet recognize that any effort to reduce staff without demonstrable and measureable improvements in compliance processes and technology would almost certainly be viewed negatively by regulators. Headcount alone cannot solve today’s compliance challenges. One possible solution lies in transformative technology that enables a shift in the focus of compliance staff from that of information gatherers to information analyzers. In other words, it is time for a paradigm shift in the financial services industry and the way regulatory compliance departments operate.
Cognitive computing for compliance
Cognitive systems are trained by humans and learn as they ingest and interpret new information. Rather than being explicitly programmed, they learn and reason from their interactions with us and from their experiences with their environment. IBM® Watson® technology represents a new era in computing called cognitive computing, where systems understand the world in a way more similar to humans: through
- senses,
- learning
- and experience.
Watson
- uses natural language processing to analyze structured and unstructured data,
- uses natural language processing to understand grammar and context,
- understands complex questions
- and proposes evidence-based answers,
based on supporting evidence and the quality of information found.
Cognitive computing is a natural fit for the regulatory compliance space because it can be used to accomplish the significant amount of analysis required to read and interpret regulations. The traditional process of distilling regulations into distinct requirements is a demanding and continuous undertaking. Compliance professionals must read hundreds of regulatory documents and determine which of the thousands of lines of text constitute true requirements. Given the same document to assess, different staff can arrive at different conclusions. In a manual environment, this adds another layer of issues to track while the parties resolve whether the identified text is or is not a requirement.
This work is usually performed on a continuous cycle and under the pressure of deadlines. The end-to-end process of identifying and finalizing the requirements inventory can be demanding and tedious. It is also traditionally encumbered by the heavy use of spreadsheets for tracking of regulations, requirements, internal decisions and statuses. Together, these conditions have the potential to negatively impact the work environment and can result in low morale and high turnover. Only when the human effort can shift from the tedium of manual processes (collect regulations, identify requirements, and track compliance issues through spreadsheets) to an automated solution will end-to-end visibility and transparency be realized. Cognitive computing technology can help an institution realign its approach from outdated information processing techniques to a state-of-the-art solution that enables this transformation.
IBM Watson Regulatory Compliance puts the power of cognitive computing into the hands of compliance professionals, giving them the capabilities needed to leverage data to help them manage risk and compliance requirements, and optimize data for more effective analysis. It is specifically tailored for compliance departments and offers, or in the future may offer, core functionalities that include:
- Document ingestion
- Requirements parsing and identification
- Requirements decisioning and management
- Categorization of requirements
- Mapping of controls to requirements
- Harmonization of risk frameworks
- Interactive reporting and analytics
- Automated audit trail
- Automated requirements catalog
- Centralized document library
Watson Regulatory Compliance is designed to help organizations use cognitive technology to transform key portions of their regulatory compliance processes that are traditionally performed manually.
These enhancements, enabled by Watson, can potentially help an organization to reallocate resources to more value-added compliance and analytic activities for improved transparency across the compliance function.
A conceptual end-to-end approach for cognitive compliance and requirement management, to categorization, mapping of controls and standards, and analytics and reporting is presented in the following figure.
Click here to access IBM’s White Paper
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