With just a few weeks to go before A-Team Group’s RegTech Summit for Capital Markets on November 16, 2017 in New York, we caught up with Tammy Eisenberg, Director, Investment Management Risk & Compliance at BNY Mellon, to talk about her views on regtech and the challenges it could address.
At the event, Eisenberg will join the keynote user panel that will discuss overcoming the barriers to regtech, The panel will be moderated by Andrew Delaney, Chief Content Officer at A-Team Group and joined by other members including Nikhil Aggarwal, FinTech Entrepreneur in Residence, iValley Innovation Center; Thomas Dunlap, Former Managing Director, Global Head of Enterprise Data Strategy, Goldman Sachs; and Subas Roy, Chairman, International RegTech Association (IRTA).
Here is a snapshot of Eisenberg’s views on regtech.
Q: What does RegTech mean to you? Why are you excited about it?
A: RegTech means the ability to automate routine or basic tasks, allowing a compliance officer to spend time on ad hoc or more complex matters. Regulators are pouring money into quantitative analytics to identify trends; compliance officers need tools of their own. Until recently, most tools focused on exception reporting. Compliance officers needed to take the data and put it into pivot tables or perform other manipulations to get a more holistic view. RegTech changes that to give compliance officers both qualitative and quantitative views, making them more effective.
Q: What is your biggest regulatory challenge?
A: The challenge is less about regulations and more about access to and making sense of data to effectively perform compliance surveillance, monitoring and testing.
Q: Why is it such a challenge?
A: Many of the systems that generate the information used by compliance officers are owned by the business or operations. That means relying on canned reports created by vendors that may not necessarily be tailored to the work to be performed by the compliance officer. In order to use that data, it must be fed into other systems or into a spreadsheet. Handling of the data means potential loss of data integrity and loss of data provenance.
The front and middle office are moving towards big data and semantic technologies to manage information across business lines, both internal and external. RegTech needs to level the playing field so that compliance officers can leverage front and middle office developments involving big data effectively.
Q: What role do RegTech providers have to play in helping solve these problems?
A: Technological solutions that solve a single or a couple of problems are no longer the answer. Compliance officers are looking for RegTech solutions that focus on leveraging and enhancing processes already in place to make compliance processes more efficient.
Q: What cool or interesting RegTech firms have you seen out there?
A: Consulting firms such as Ascendant have moved beyond consulting services to develop transaction monitoring solutions that involve data aggregation. A number of firms are looking into semantic data and artificial intelligence, including IBM with Watson.
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