Over the last two weeks JWG, the trusted industry expert in regulatory intelligence, has been participating in a reporting TechSprint organised be the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Bank of England (BoE). The successful Sprint was set up to explore the potential for model-driven, machine executable regulation with participants ranging from large investment banks through to specialist RegTech providers, such as JWG.

Chris Woolard, Board Member and Executive Director of Strategy & Competition at the FCA, commented: “The issues we are trying to resolve together in this sprint really matter. This is not just a question of efficiency. It’s about how reliable is that information is as it’s handed over every single day – the speed at which that is done and the accuracy with which we can form our own policy making.”

JWG’s CEO, PJ Di Giammarino, added: “2017 has been the year for breaking down the barriers to collaboration and this TechSprint has really set us up for a fast start in 2018. There is now a whole semantic ecosystem of tech companies that are able to encapsulate human knowledge in ways that machines can leverage to define what good looks like – and ensure the controls are in place to measure performance. We are proud to have RegDelta playing a key role in this new ecosystem.”

The ambitious TechSprint successfully proved that a regulatory requirement, written and released by the FCA, could be translated into code and mapped directly to a financial institution’s data. This collaborative achievement creates the potential for automated, straight-through-processing of regulatory returns – which would ultimately limit the need for extensive and costly interpretation within a bank. 

Elliot Burgess, Head of Product and Client Services at JWG explained: “At the moment reporting liabilities is a very drawn-out process due to the huge gap between abstraction from written regulation into what balance sheet information a financial institution is reporting on. As a result, there are many people and parties involved in interpreting the regulation and responding to it. Not only is this incredibly time intensive but there is also the distinct risk of losing the intended purpose of the regulation along the way.”

Collaborating with peers including Credit Suisse, GRCTC, Governor Software, Grant Thornton, Hitachi, Regnosys, and Linklaters, Lombard Risk and Santander at the TechSprint, JWG’s analysts successfully utilised its next generation RegDelta platform to automate much of the labour-intensive tracking and reviewing of the regulatory document at the front end of the process. RegDelta’s semantic ontology platform converts, loads and enriches every document with a proprietary model for FS obligations, giving an enterprise the power to reassemble and configure its obligations and know when changes occur. Within the context of the TechSprint this meant other RegTech service providers could then more easily understand the context for the initiative, interpret the rule and then execute against it with minimal human interaction.