With its sophisticated rule mapping system, Single Rulebook matches each new UK regulation with the corresponding EU rule in an easy to follow rule map. For example, take RTS 8 in MiFID II. Our visual rule map takes you directly to the new and corresponding UK rules (MAR 5 and MAR 7) and with one click, you can go straight to the new UK regulation.
Rule maps provide visual guidance on interdependent regulation for every single article, allowing users to understand correlations and relationships between regulatory rules without leaving the platform.
If you need help navigating regulation in a post Brexit world, please contact us.
We are delighted to announce that we have joined forces with Kaizen Reporting and from today, Single Rulebook is part of the Kaizen team.
Formed in 2013, Kaizen Reporting provides services for regulatory reporting including assurance and shareholding disclosure services. They comprise a team of highly skilled regulatory and technology specialists on a mission to transform the quality of regulatory reporting in the financial services industry.
Kaizen’s multi-award winning ReportShield™ delivers quality assurance services which are unique in providing full visibility of reporting quality. The company’s services are used by some of the world’s largest banks, asset managers, hedge funds and brokers.
Single Rulebook allows you to search, share and manage complex regulatory rules on one digital platform. It will enhance Kaizen’s regulatory offering, providing value added services to clients struggling to cope with the burden of ever changing regulatory rules.
If you would like more information, or want to talk to one of our specialists, please contact us.
Author: Wim Nelen
As singlerulebook.com is shortlisted as the Best Data Solution for Regulatory Compliance in the Data Management Insight Awards, it seems a good opportunity to explain how singlerulebook.com provides programmatic access to regulation and how that enables digital transformation of regulated firms.
Requirements
The core dataset of legal and compliance work is formed of regulatory requirements. The requirements typically come from a wide variety of different sources and they evolve all the time. They get interpreted and applied within a constantly evolving body of policies, processes and systems. This is the control framework for which designated individuals are held accountable.
What senior managers and other accountable staff need is traceability to regulation, and assurance that controls based on regulation are sound and properly maintained.
Programmatic access
Programmatic access to regulation provides this traceability, makes the control framework much more efficient and removes error-prone manual steps. Regulatory change programmes typically start off with copy pasting paragraphs of regulation into a spreadsheet. It is an almost impossible task to keep track of shared artefacts of constantly evolving regulatory requirements within different spreadsheets and different business requirement documents across a complex regulated firm. Accessing regulation via an API will put all staff, systems and processes on the same page, making the control framework more effective and efficient.
Moreover, programmatic access to regulation is the cornerstone of digital transformation. How do you maintain a bot that has automated a specific legal or compliance process? By feeding it with auditable updates of regulatory requirements.
singlerulebook.com provides programmatic access to regulation. It uses Natural Language Processing and deep learning to aggregate, standardise and pre-index a constantly updated digital feed of regulatory data. singlerulebook.com users can easily integrate regulation with policies, systems and controls. The service effectively allows you to bootstrap traceability with regulation onto any existing policy, process or system.
If you wish you receive more information on this topic, please feel free to contact us.
Author: Chris Dingley
The financial services industry continues to rely on horizon scanning tools + spreadsheets to manage regulatory change. Can we now say that tools exist that will promote organisational change?
Regulations change continually from initial drafting, through implementation and via further rules changes and guidance when they are in force. Regulation is maintained in many different formats and locations, creating complexity to analyse texts across regulations. To solve this problem, software will need to digitise and structure texts.
Establishing traceability
It is very uncommon for a firm to be able to establish traceability and robustly link their implementations back to the underlying regulation. Traceability to the regulation decreases costs for firms through increased compliance and decreased rework. It benefits individuals from board level downwards who can demonstrate an appropriate level of professional diligence. It also creates the foundation for ongoing automation of regulatory workflows.
Even the smallest firm will have multiple understandings of each regulation. Someone needs to own the house view and make this available across functions and locations. Large organisations struggle to maintain a view on where and how new regulation is implemented. We also operate in an environment where new regulation sits alongside and on-top of old.
The Covid epidemic is the latest cost pressure to hit an industry already dealing with long-term pressures on margins. Cost pressures are now impacting the previously untouchable compliance function. Firms that can see beyond the current paradigm will decrease cost and risk in managing their compliance.
The technology most suited to tackling these problems is natural language processing (NLP). singlerulebook.com is an example of a domain-specific implementation of NLP.
NLP engines allow regulation to be digitised into a graph representation. The graph structure creates and maintains links between regulations that are otherwise hard to track. Changes in texts are identified, contextualised and surfaced by the technology. Digitised regulation is queried semantically, enhancing completeness and efficiency.
Building a specialised workflow for tracking regulation
This creates a robust lineage of regulation. Using links to third party applications creates traceability from regulation to implementation. We now exist in a software ecosystem where software is able to communicate via APIs. Regulations can now talk to business processes via API.
singlerulebook.com uses state of the art tooling and approaches to enhance the depth of benefit that integration with other systems can provide. For example, integrations completed against our graph respond automatically to changes in regulation. There is no “human in the loop” processing and analysis of documents. Changes and impacts are analysed on the same day that they are published. The existing generation of software is typically blind to second-order impacts, as it does not deploy this technology, or relies on human analysis to break down documentation. This approach is both slow and subject to error.
Tool adoption is also determined by processes within firms. So are the organisational barriers to adopting improved tooling insurmountable? Organisational complexity is seen as the key barrier to implementing a traceability tool. For example, adopting tooling will look different at different stages in the lifecycle of a regulation. Doing this at the drafting stage would be ideal, but how does this fit with the mass of already implemented rules that we are dealing with currently?
Interpretation of regulation happens in many places. This may begin with an initial breakdown from a lawyer and end up in the hands of an external developer or junior operations clerk. Understanding where these weaknesses lie helps firms decrease the risk of non-compliance.
Financial services firms must also deal with the large number of joiners and leavers across a project lifecycle. These may be permanent staff or contractors, but in each case a leaver takes away some level of understanding that costs time (and money) to reacquire.
Our recommendations
In our recent singlerulebook webinar on the topic of traceability, our panel broadly discussed three key recommendations for improving regulatory change management.
- Lifecycle – track regulations across their lifecycle using software. Where are we applying this regulation? Has the guidance changed?
- Centralisation – ensure the house view is widely available to staff. Have strong policies on ownership for regulatory obligations. Ensure handoff from projects into BAU.
- Embed tooling – ensure adoption of tooling through strong processes to realise benefits. Leave behind a process that proactively reacts to changing regulation
These recommendations show that both technology and process have a role to play in changing how firms manage change. We don’t exclude spreadsheets from this future state – in fact we offer functionality to enhance them.
However, modern regulatory traceability is the foundation to build a new way of working.
With climate/ESG regulation developing, IFR/IFD, CRR 2/CRD V, CFTC reporting, SEC reporting and more upcoming, firms have the perfect opportunity to review how they work with regulation.
If you wish to discuss this further, please contact us.