The International Securities Swaps and Derivatives Association has selected Gentek AI to build a traceability tool for Digital Regulatory Reporting (DRR). Gentek will develop a tool designed to let users track the history of DRR decision-making and connect coding choices back to regulatory requirements. The story behind the announcement is that Gentek comes to the project with deep expertise grounded in the operational strain of transaction reporting, post-trade processing, and securities finance.
In conversation with RegTech Insight, Gentek AI CEO Pierre Khemdoudi described a career path that began in engineering and ran through banking and market infrastructure before reaching RegTech. “I’m an engineer at heart,” he said. He traced a route from aerospace engineering to banking at BNP Paribas, where he worked across regions and on the trading side of securities finance, including swaps and repos.That background became more directly relevant when Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR) reporting arrived in 2017 and drew transaction reporting into the securities finance world. Khemdoudi said that shift exposed both the scale of the market opportunity and the weakness of the prevailing operating model. Much of the technology was on-premises, labour-intensive and built around repeated deployment of consultants. His response was to build a different model.
Khemdoudi continues, ““While at IHS Markit, I secured funding from CEO Lance Uggla to build an industry-standard solution to help firms cope with the SFTR challenge. After the launch, we acquired Catena in Asia and Cappitech in Europe, bringing both together under the Cappitech name within IHS Markit, to create a multi-regime, G20 SaaS, cloud-based transaction reporting solution.” That business grew quickly, “We launched 200 plus institutions on day one successfully, and later scaled to more than 500 clients,” he recalls.
But the larger lesson from that phase was that message delivery alone did not solve a deeper reporting problem: Firms could move data from point A to point B, but validation, quality, interpretation, and recoding remained manual and expensive. “There’s so many rules that actually coding them is a nightmare and they change regularly ” he said.
That frustration shaped Gentek’s formation. Khemdoudi said he left S&P and build a new company with former colleagues and to focus fully on applying new AI techniques to operational problems in regulated environments. The first phase was spent building a common code base and testing it across sectors. The next step was a return to what the founding team knew best – regulatory reporting. There, Gentek’s proposition was not just to identify reporting issues but to act on them through agentic workflows that could understand exceptions, find root causes, and tie remediation back to the relevant rules.This background helps explain why Gentek AI was a fit for ISDA’s requirement since the company was already working on attribution, retrieval and traceability capabilities that could be reused for the new tool. “We made it clear to ISDA what we are reusing and how we are reusing,” he said, adding that Gentek’s existing core engine meant the project could move on a short timetable.
For firms adopting DRR, the attraction of a shared reporting model comes with a governance challenge. When a third party manages standardised logic, users need to understand where changes originated, how those changes relate to the underlying law and what impact they may have across versions. Khemdoudi said the tool is intended to provide that visibility, including historical traceability as well as forward-looking change management. “We will reload everything, so you get the full history,” he said, adding that users must be able to see “where it started and what is it connected to in terms of changes in the underlying law.”
Following a sustained period of refits and rewrites, the industry has a window of opportunity to rethink the economics of the regulatory reporting stack and AI has altered the economics. Khemdoudi observes, “The technology lowered the barrier for the cost of adoption,” he said framing this next stage as “RegTech 3.0,” in which firms retain control of their own reporting backbone while drawing on shared industry infrastructure such as the common domain model (CDM) and standardised reporting via DRR.
DRR has always promised a more standardised and machine-executable approach to regulatory reporting, but wider adoption depends on trust as much as technology. Firms need to know how reporting logic has changed and explain those changes to internal stakeholders and supervisors.
In announcing the appointment of Gentek AI, David Shone, Senior Director, Data & Digital Solutions at ISDA, said: “Traceability is a foundational requirement for scalable, trusted digital regulatory reporting. Gentek AI demonstrated a strong alignment with ISDA’s vision for an open, auditable and AI-driven traceability framework that links regulatory text, working group decisions and DRR code in a transparent and sustainable fashion. Development of the traceability tool will strengthen confidence, consistency and accountability across the ISDA DRR ecosystem.”
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