About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

Opinion: How Many ‘R’s Are There in Financial Services Regulation?

Subscribe to our newsletter

By Alex Foster, Global Head of Strategy & Business Development – BT Financial Technology Services

Throughout history, the letter ‘R’ has represented a succession of important codes of conduct.

We have the famous ‘three ‘R’s of education’: reading, writing, and arithmetic, which can be traced back as early as 401 AD from Saint Augustine’s The Confessions (although most historical sources quote a speech by Sir William Curtis in 1795). During the 17th century in the New England colonies they added a fourth ‘R’, that of Religion.

Then, in the 1930s, Roosevelt introduced the three ‘R’s of Relief, Recovery and Reform – the latter of which is still relevant today forming part of the banking reform acts of 1930.

And in 2009, a year after the deep depression and the financial crisis, the International Monetary Fund came up with a new set of five ‘R’s — Rescue, Recovery, Rebalancing, Regulation and Reform.

But, when it comes to financial services compliance, there are many more ‘R’s which need to be considered. From Dodd Frank, EMIR to MIFID II, regulations are in place which require financial services institutions to Read, Record, Retain, Restore, Retrieve, Replay, Recite, Recreate and Reconstruct — all of which need to be done Reliably! We are talking ‘R’s to the nth degree, and all of these ‘R’s are in place for one reason — to mitigate Risk.

Regulators can call for a reconstruction of a trade at any time. So, there is a need for Real time Recording and Retention of all customer interactions. Firms need to be able to Retrieve, Research and Replay, to Resolve customer or compliance queries. They can do this by using sophisticated analytical ‘Rummaging’ techniques, all with a Retention management wrapper.

In a recent webinar hosted by A-Team Group, BT’s Tim Furmidge, Head of Product Management, Financial Technology Services illustrated how systems can be introduced in a staged way. He also discussed how the proactive management of firms’ risk and compliance environments can not only help them stay ahead of the regulatory wave, but also deliver significant productivity gains.

So, in a world where penalties for non-compliance include fines and reputational damage, financial services firms would do well to remember their ‘R’s.

And what of the three ‘R’s in school today? Well, in my daughter’s school, it’s been expanded to the six ‘R’s — Resiliency, Reflective, Resourceful, Responsible, Relationship and Risk — all attributes which could be applied to financial firms when addressing their compliance challenges.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Strategies and solutions for unlocking value from unstructured data

Unstructured data accounts for a growing proportion of the information that capital markets participants are using in their day-to-day operations. Technology – especially generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) – is enabling organisations to prise crucial insights from sources – such as social media posts, news articles and sustainability and company reports – that were all but...

BLOG

A-Team Group Announces Winners of its Prestigious Innovation Awards 2025

The most innovative data and technology solutions for capital markets were recognised today as A-Team Group announced the winners of this year’s A-Team Group Innovation Awards 2025. Now in its fifth year, the prestigious awards recognise the innovative projects created across the vendor and practitioner communities that provide high-value solutions to organisations within capital markets...

EVENT

TradingTech Briefing New York

Our TradingTech Briefing in New York is aimed at senior-level decision makers in trading technology, electronic execution, trading architecture and offers a day packed with insight from practitioners and from innovative suppliers happy to share their experiences in dealing with the enterprise challenges facing our marketplace.

GUIDE

AI in Capital Markets: Practical Insight for a Transforming Industry – Free Handbook

AI is no longer on the horizon – it’s embedded in the infrastructure of modern capital markets. But separating real impact from inflated promises requires a grounded, practical understanding. The AI in Capital Markets Handbook 2025 provides exactly that. Designed for data-driven professionals across the trade life-cycle, compliance, infrastructure, and strategy, this handbook goes beyond...