Transforming Regulatory Compliance with Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI), long the subject of science fiction, is now becoming more and more widespread and is seen as an increasingly important computer science across multiple industries.In Financial Services in particular, Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing is increasingly used today to make sense of big, complex data in a wide range of areas. One such area is regulatory compliance.The use of AI -- particularly Natural Language Understanding (NLU), a subset of Natural Language Processing –can help firms to realise a number of benefits, including improving the speed and efficiency with which they achieve compliance, and making that compliance much more robust. As we've seen over just the last couple of years with the introduction of MiFIDI & II, UCITS, AIFMD and the like, there is a constant stream of documents being issued by regulators, which can each run to hundreds, or even thousands, of pages. Wading through those documents and trying to pick out the pieces that are important so that appropriate rules can be built, code can be written and reporting systems can be automated (for example), is an onerous task for human beings. In order to achieve compliance, many regulated firms take the approach of partnering up with third party consulting firms, paying large sums to them to help interpret the regulations employing people to write up what everything means from a rules perspective, then attempting to code those rules into their systems.