AI-powered compliance company Ascent has partnered with IBM, which will see the RegTech integrate its solutions in an effort to help financial institutions keep abreast of ever-changing regulatory requirements.
Specifically, IBM is integrating Ascent’s regulatory knowledge platform with its IBM OpenPages with Watson solution. Clients will be able to feed their regulatory obligations and rule changes – which are automatically generated and updated by Ascent – into IBM OpenPages with Watson in order to better manage downstream compliance activities.
The IBM and Ascent partnership was the direct result of Ascent’s successful proof of concept engagement with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), earlier this year, wherein IBM was also a key technology partner. the trail saw the companies combine their solutions to identify and analyse more than 1.5 million paragraphs of regulatory text from the country’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II. The solution allowed CBA to quickly identify terms in the regulation that they needed to review and act upon – a process that would have taken days of manual scanning.
“The potential of this technology for the Bank and the financial services industry more broadly is exciting,” said Jasper Poos, head of governance and assurance at CBA. “By digitising parts of the regulatory change process, and the automation of continuously refreshing data we can improve the application of regulation, efficiency for our business as well as provide greater transparency with regulators. It’s been rewarding to collaborate with our RegTech and technology partners on a project that will have such a large, positive impact for our industry.”
David Marmer, vice president of offering management atIBM RegTech, added “AI for business is only as good as the ecosystem around it. And our collaboration with Ascent on the CBA solution is a great example of bringing innovative technologies together with purpose to help solve a growing challenge. Regulation can be complex, time consuming and costly. But with the application of AI and dynamically updated rules changes, companies are positioned to begin to operate and advance within those parameters quickly and easily.”
Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Acent, also commented, “We are pleased to launch this joint initiative with one of the world’s leading technology companies. Ascent is designed to work with OpenPages and other enterprise systems in a powerful and complementary way. Ascent’s ability to map obligations and regulatory changes targeted to the customer is a powerful workflow trigger for GRCs. We are excited about the implications it will have for our clients in financial services and look forward to helping them dramatically reduce regulatory risks and costs going forward.”
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