IT heavyweight IBM and mass media firm Thomson Reuters have joined forces to help banks tackle perennial regulatory compliance changes by combining artificial intelligence (AI) with real-time regulatory insights.
Their new RegTech solution, delivered straight from the IBM Cloud, features real-time financial services data taken from thousands of content sources . Backed by the power of AI and domain knowledge of Promontory Financial Group, the collaboration will enable financial services professionals to keep pace with regulatory changes, manage risk and reduce the cost and hassle associated with compliance. Promontory Financial Group, a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM, is a global consulting firm that advises clients on a variety of financial services matters, including regulatory issues, compliance, risk management, liquidity, restructuring, acquisitions, due diligence, internal investigations and cyber security.
What’s more, the new solution is available worldwide to OpenPages customers beginning today. OpenPages is a Governance Risk and Compliance Software produced by IBM which helps compliance professionals manage risk on a day-to-day basis.
IBM OpenPages with Watson (IBM’s AI system) incorporates both the expertise of Promontory Financial Group and Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence to help its users create libraries of relevant regulatory requirements, map them to their organization’s internal framework and evaluate their overall impact to the business.
This isn’t the first time that Thomson Reuters and IBM have collaborated on AI and data intelligence. In October 2015, Thomson Reuters and IBM collaborated to deliver Watson Cognitive Computing Technology.
Regtech: The next big thing
IBM works with 97 percent of the world’s largest banks while Thomson Reuters delivers a focused, comprehensive view of the global regulatory environment using trusted intelligence. Over the past two years, IBM built end-to-end RegTech software capabilities for the financial services industry. Now, IBM and Thomson Reuters are combining their efforts to better enable financial institutions to monitor, analyze and act upon regulatory developments worldwide – all in real time.
“Combining worldwide regulatory-specific content, AI and advanced analytics, IBM OpenPages with Watson provides visibility into pending regulatory changes to take the guesswork out for compliance professionals. It also helps project what business impact those changes will likely have on the organization,” said Alistair Rennie, General Manager – Watson Financial Services, IBM. “This regulatory intelligence solution developed with Thomson Reuters brings a new level of insight and intelligence to the complex challenges of regulatory compliance.”
Combining content with AI technology
Financial institutions across the world are faced with hundreds of regulatory alerts each day, with an estimated 300 million new pages of regulations on the way by 2020. Currently, risk and compliance professionals go through the manual, time-consuming process of sifting through all this information and prioritizing alerts based on their potential impact. Now, IBM and Thomson Reuters are providing banks with a way to digitize this: helping organizations to integrate all their risk data together using global coverage of more than 900 regulatory bodies and 2,500 collections of regulatory and legislative materials.
“Collaborating with IBM enhances access to Thomson Reuters industry-leading regulatory insights, news analyses and research, providing compliance professionals in financial services and other industries the tools they need to manage regulatory change and complexity in a single framework,” said Chris Carlstead, head of partnerships and alliances for Thomson Reuters Corporates Segment. “Combining our content with IBM’s exceptional AI technology on a platform will dramatically transform the way risk professionals manage their daily compliance burden.”
As per this Accenture Study, clarity of roles and decisive leadership will be critical in delivering a compliance function for the information age. It’s hoped that this new piece of Regtech from IBM and Thomson Reuters will drastically aid this by making the day-to-day compliance function easier, quicker, and more efficient.