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Navigating the ever-changing landscape of financial regulations is no small feat. Traditional regulatory change management—often manual, slow, and resource-intensive—struggles to keep pace with the constant evolution of regulations. This complexity, combined with fragmented manual processes, creates gaps and hidden risks that grow as policies and controls are updated.

The Power of Compliance Automation

Compliance automation, driven by AI, is the solution. By embracing intelligent technology, compliance teams gain agile change management capabilities, eliminating manual tasks, enhancing efficiency, and identifying rule changes in real-time. This empowers your business to adapt swiftly to the dynamic regulatory environment.

Explore AI-Enabled Change Management

In collaboration with GRC 20/20 Research, we’ve developed a practical guide, “Delivering the AI Enabled Regulatory Change Lifecycle.” This guide will help you understand how to digitally transform your change management operations and manage risk effectively by anchoring your obligations, policies, and controls in regulatory and corporate truth.

New to Compliance Automation? Start Here.

Before diving into the whitepaper, discover four ways compliance automation can transform your business:

1. Quickly Identify and Act on Regulatory Changes
Leverage Ascent’s AI-powered automation to monitor regulatory updates in real-time, pinpoint relevant rule changes, and notify stakeholders of impacts—eliminating manual review and reducing risk.

2. Mitigate Obligation Gap Risk
Ascent’s patented AI breaks down regulatory text to map new obligations against your existing inventory, identifying potential gaps and reducing the likelihood of penalties.

3. Focus on Strategic Initiatives
Automation frees your team from time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on data-driven decisions, strategic alignment with regulatory requirements, and strengthening policies and controls.

4. Scale Compliance Management Across Your Enterprise
Transform workflows with automation, streamlining routine tasks like policy approval and audit scheduling. Our platform integrates seamlessly with leading GRC systems, ensuring end-to-end traceability and automatic updates when rules change.

Take Control with Ascent

Ready to dive deeper? Download the GRC 20/20 Research whitepaper today to explore Ascent’s approach to AI-powered change management.

For more information or to set up a conversation, contact Ascent.

Strategic acquisition strengthens Ascent’s market leadership position in compliance automation and obligations management solutions for financial services

[Chicago, February 8, 2024] — Ascent Technologies, a leading provider of AI-enabled compliance automation solutions for financial services companies, today announced it has acquired Waymark, a UK-based provider of horizon scanning and compliance management workflow solutions.

This strategic move follows Ascent’s recent acquisition by Edgewater Equity Partners. The integration of Ascent and Waymark creates a comprehensive solution for horizon scanning and obligations management, establishing a new benchmark for managing regulatory risk.

Waymark’s advanced horizon scanning tools augment Ascent’s industry-leading obligations management technology, and the combined company now offers full regulatory coverage of the US, the EU and UK. This combination underscores Ascent’s commitment to driving growth, fostering innovation, and expanding its service offering.

“Ascent’s technology quickly and efficiently identifies relevant regulatory obligations, a critical task for navigating the intricate, ever-changing regulatory landscape,” noted Chris Junker, Ascent CEO. “With the addition of Waymark’s technology, particularly its horizon scanning functions, Ascent now serves up insights into where regulations may be headed as well as a precise, timely and actionable picture of current regulatory demands.”

Powerful Obligations Identification and Horizon Scanning for Automated Compliance Management

Ascent now automates two critical and resource-intensive components of regulatory compliance for financial services firms – horizon scanning and the identification of regulatory obligations tailored to each firm’s business.

Compliance organizations traditionally have reviewed an endless deluge of regulatory documents to identify and analyze applicable rule changes. The Ascent platform replaces these slow, costly, manual processes with patented AI that monitors the financial services regulatory landscape in real time, identifies rule changes and obligations that apply to a company, and notifies stakeholders of applicable rule changes and obligations.

“Knowing one’s regulatory obligations is foundational for financial services firms striving to adhere to evolving regulations,” explained Jon Leitner, President of Ascent. “Once organizations use Ascent to understand current-state regulations, the next step is to anticipate and prepare for upcoming regulatory changes. This is why Waymark horizon scanning fits so well with Ascent.”

Customer Ian Hollowbread, COO – Digital Innovation at ING said that, “Ascent is at the forefront of the AI regulatory revolution. Ascent’s processing intelligence helps firms understand their regulatory obligations with precision. In combination with Waymark’s deep horizon scanning capabilities, we believe that this merger provides the potential to offer both the depth and breadth to meet the market needs for effective, comprehensive risk management.”

Mark Holmes, founder and CEO of Waymark, expressed enthusiasm about the acquisition, stating, “This partnership is a game-changer for the industry. Our combined strengths deliver an advanced compliance automation solution for our customers who now have access to the best US and Canadian regulatory content, while Ascent significantly expands its coverage in the UK and EU.”

Here’s the November issue of Ascent’s Compliance Insider!

We hope you had a filling and relaxing Thanksgiving with friends and family! As the countdown to the new year begins and you plan for 2024, we hope to provide helpful content as you review your organization’s compliance technology roadmap. Here are a few new articles and resources that can help.

Part 2 of “Pillars of Strong Compliance”
Part 1 covered compliance fundamentals, stressing corporate definition and law identification. Now, we focus on creating a centralized regulatory obligations library, empowering efficient policy and control management.

Read Part 2 here.

The Gap in the Compliance Automation Value Chain
Why must compliance teams spend so much time reading through a never-ending deluge of regulatory documents just to identify the rule changes that apply to their companies?

It comes down to automation – or the lack thereof. To explore further, take a look at what we call the “gap in the compliance automation value chain.”

Read the article here.

Analyst Report on AI-driven Compliance
Compliance analyst GRC 20/20 just published a detailed report on Ascent compliance automation software. For a deep dive into the Ascent solution, from building an obligations inventory to managing regulatory change.

Access the report here.

Regulatory Roundup
Each month, our team of regulatory compliance experts round up the latest financial services regulatory news, regulations and enforcement actions to keep you abreast of the latest in the industry. Here’s this month’s highlights:

• Cryptocurrency
• Fintech
• Rulemaking & Regulations

Read the full roundup here.

Subscribe to Compliance Insider below.

In this post, we continue our three-part series on the essential components of a strong compliance program, as outlined in Ascent’s Regulatory Compliance Scorecard.

In our first article, we explored the foundational aspects of compliance, emphasizing the importance of defining corporate entities and identifying applicable laws, rules, and regulations. Now, as we journey further into the world of compliance, we explore the process of building an accurate, centralized regulatory obligations library – which is essential to enabling compliance teams to effectively and efficiently incorporate obligations into policies and controls.

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Creating a Tailored Inventory of Regulatory Obligations

A robust compliance program requires the creation of tailored lists of obligations for each corporate entity, drilled down to the citation level. This granular approach ensures that every regulatory obligation is explicitly documented and understood. It empowers your organization to address compliance with a level of precision that leaves no room for ambiguity.

Utilize these lists of obligations as your compliance blueprint. They provide a detailed, step-by-step guide to fulfilling your compliance responsibilities. Each obligation is like a puzzle piece, and when you fit them all together correctly, they form a complete picture of compliance.

There are numerous benefits to creating an accurate obligations inventory:

1. Clarity: Every team member knows precisely what is expected, reducing confusion and errors.
2. Accountability: When obligations are well-documented, it becomes easier to assign responsibility for their fulfillment.
3. Efficiency: With detailed obligations in hand, your organization can allocate resources more efficiently, focusing on areas of greater risk or significance.
4. Audit-Readiness: In the case of regulatory audits, having comprehensive lists of obligations ensures you can provide a detailed compliance audit trail.

Centralizing Obligations: The Repository of Compliance Knowledge

Establishing a central obligations inventory for all of your business’s regulatory obligations serves as a repository of knowledge, for well informed decision making. This library should be designed to accommodate updates, revisions, and real-time additions as regulatory requirements change.

Here’s why a central obligations library is crucial:

1. Accessibility: All relevant compliance information is in one place, accessible to authorized personnel whenever needed.
2. Consistency: Centralized data ensures that everyone in your organization is working with the same information.
3. Efficiency: When you can easily locate and retrieve compliance data, it streamlines decision-making, reporting, and auditing processes.
4. Scalability: As your organization grows or regulations change, your centralized compliance repository can expand and adapt to accommodate new obligations and requirements.

In addition to centralization, integration of your obligation library with best-in-class GRC platforms Diligent, IBM OpenPages, Onspring, and Resolver enable compliance teams to efficiently map obligations to organizational policies, procedures and controls.

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As you continue to build a strong compliance infrastructure, remember that this foundation is not static; it should evolve in step with regulatory changes and organizational growth.

In the final article of our series, we will explore how to maintain a strong compliance program by proactively monitoring the regulatory landscape for effective change management.

Why must compliance teams spend so much time reading through a never-ending deluge of regulatory documents just to identify the rule changes that apply to their companies?

It comes down to automation – or the lack thereof.

To explore further, let’s take a look at what we call the “compliance automation value chain.”

There are three essential components to the compliance automation value chain:

1.     Document collection
2.     Regulation and obligation identification
3.     Policy and control management

Until recently, only two of these components have been automated:

1. Document Collection

At the beginning of the compliance automation value chain, document vendors significantly automate horizon scanning or document collection. The challenge is that these documents provide little insight into which regulations and obligations apply to a particular company. They provide the document, and the rest is up to the compliance team, who must read through stacks of these reports, identify the changes, and then determine if and how they apply.

2. Policy and Control Management

At the back of the compliance automation value chain are technology solutions, such as GRC platforms. This is what compliance teams use to incorporate new rules and obligations into organizational policies, procedures, and workflows.  

Though effective at managing policies and procedures, GRC platforms traditionally offer no capabilities that identify the rule changes and obligations on which those policies and procedures should be based – hampering compliance teams’ ability to efficiently manage compliance policies and procedures. 

The compliance automation gap

The automation gap, which sits between these two components, is the identification of applicable rule changes and obligations. If your compliance team is like many, they’re forced to spend an enormous amount of time reading through document after document to identify their company’s regulatory obligations. 

And it’s the obligations that matter.

Completing the compliance automation value chain      

This is why we built the Ascent platform – to complete the compliance automation value chain for financial services compliance teams – to free them from reading through page after page of regulatory text to identify their company’s specific rule changes and obligations.

The Ascent platform employs AI to automatically identify and deliver company-specific rule changes and obligations from regulatory documents.  Ascent focuses on the regulatory obligations – serving only relevant information, removing the irrelevant, while surfacing a company’s applicable obligations under any given rule. 

With Ascent connected to a GRC platform, organizations benefit from a complete compliance automation solution that includes horizon scanning, obligations inventory, and policy and control management. 

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We invite you to learn more about compliance automation. Click here to schedule a call with an Ascent compliance specialist.