Thompson Reuters, a multinational mass media and information firm has partnered with tech giant IBM and launched a new AI which aims at simplifying regulatory compliance challenges faced by Financial institutions. Major Banks and financial institutions are seeing an ever growing regulatory compliance requirement. Through this joint collaborations, both companies aim to offer financial institutions access to RegTech Solutions offered by IBM cloud that features real time financial services data from thousands of content sources. While IBM is already actively offering this service via its own product, with the integration of new AI and data combination mechanism, the partnership enables the product to overcome its previous limitations. IBM currently caters to nearly 97% of the world’s top banks with domain knowledge of Promontory Financial group – a wholly owned subsidiary of IBM. IT has also been developing end to end RegTech software for finance service industry. Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters has been delivering a focused comprehensive view of global regulatory environment using trusted intelligence via its various Fintech Products.
Through this collaboration they have developed an AI to enable risk and compliance professionals to keep pace with regulatory changes, manage risk and reduce the overall cost of compliance. The addition of this new AI and data combination mechanism to the product is expected to help financial institutions monitor, analyze and act upon regulatory developments worldwide in real time thereby improving their service offerings. When speaking about this partnership and their new product, Alistair Rennie, General Manager of Watson Financial Services, IBM stated “Combining worldwide regulatory-specific content, AI and advanced analytics, IBM OpenPages with Watson provides visibility into pending regulatory changes to take the guesswork out for compliance professionals. It also helps project exactly what business impact those changes will likely have on the organization. This regulatory intelligence solution developed with Thomson Reuters brings a new level of insight and intelligence to the complex challenges of regulatory compliance”. According to the press release, the finance industry is seeing a sharp increase in regulatory alters each day and predicts that there will be over 300 million new regulations by 2020.
It is a highly taxing and time consuming process for professionals to ensure manual risk and regulatory compliance. It takes long for professionals to read all information and allocate alters based on applicability and impact forcing financial institutions to utilize disparate data and AI system to meet said requirements. However, the latest offering from this joint venture enables banks and major finance institutions to digitize manual governance, risk and compliance process by integrating all their risk data using their product which has global coverage of more than 900 regulatory bodies and 2500 collections of regulatory and legislative materials. Thomson Reuters & IBM have already been collaborating since 2015 to resolve industry specific problems in area such as health care and data privacy via AI & Data intelligence. With launch of this joint venture AI, IBM OpenPages gains access to Watson 8.0 enabling the users of this product to get an updated user experience allowing for increased engagement transforming the way risk and compliance professions work. Users of OpenPages can now create libraries of relevant regulatory requirements, map them to their international framework and evaluate their impact to the business. This helps compliance professionals easily and actively participate in risk management as part of their day to day activities as the new AI helps them gain a holistic view of their risk and regulatory responsibilities.