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Jul 14
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Ascent and IBM Integrate AI RegTech Solutions to Help Financial Institutions Streamline their Compliance Operations

By Blog

“The potential of this technology for the Bank and the financial services industry more broadly is exciting. 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.” —Jasper Poos, Head of Governance and Assurance, Commonwealth Bank of Australia

 

Chicago and Armonk, NY: July 15, 2020 – Ascent, a provider of AI-based solutions that automate regulatory compliance processes, and IBM today announced a partnership to integrate their respective RegTech solutions in an effort to help banks and other financial institutions better manage their growing and 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 integrated solution is designed to help regulated businesses keep better pace with today’s rapidly changing regulatory environment and help lower risk for potential fines and other supervisory actions. In addition, customers can benefit from the combined dynamic workflow capabilities and near real-time market intelligence by reducing the manual effort and time spent in transferring regulatory information between teams and disparate systems. 

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 companies combined the Ascent platform with OpenPages with Watson which leveraged natural language processing and AI algorithms to identify and analyze 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 Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “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.” 

“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,” said David Marmer, Vice President, Offering Management, IBM RegTech. “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.”

“We are pleased to launch this joint initiative with one of the world’s leading technology companies,” said Brian Clark, Ascent Founder & CEO. “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.”

Ascent has been rapidly gaining momentum since its founding in 2015. Since its inception, Ascent has grown 100% YOY, secured $26.7M in funding, and expanded to 50 full-time employees. 

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About Ascent

Ascent was founded in 2015 to help financial services firms automate the most tedious and error-prone aspects of compliance. With customers from Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks and other financial firms around the world, Ascent provides Knowledge-as-a-Service (KaaS) as a groundbreaking new way to navigate the increasingly complex world of regulations quickly, efficiently, and most important of all, reliably. Learn more at www.ascentregtech.com.  

About IBM OpenPages with Watson

For more information about the latest release of IBM OpenPages with Watson, version 8.2, check out the IBM webinar on June 23.

View this announcement on the IBM News Room.

Media Contact:

Patrick Phalon
MacMillan Communications
(917) 689-3438
patrick@macmillancom.com

Michael Zimmerman
IBM Media Relations
mrzimmerman@us.ibm.com

Apr 14
Love1

Ascent Launches Enhanced Regulatory Monitoring Solution

By Blog

“Helping customers successfully navigate their regulatory requirements in an uncertain world has never been more important, and the addition of our new regulatory monitoring solution better positions us to do that going forward.” —Brian Clark, Founder and CEO, Ascent

Ascent, an AI-driven solution that helps customers automate regulatory compliance, today announced the launch of its new regulatory monitoring and intelligence solution.

Brian Clark, Ascent Founder & CEO, commented, “Ascent was founded in response to the  2008 financial crisis, so we are keenly aware of the challenges that Risk and Compliance teams — our customers — are facing in today’s climate. Helping customers successfully navigate their changing regulatory requirements has never been more important, and the addition of our new regulatory monitoring solution better positions us to do that going forward.”

Ascent’s enhanced regulatory monitoring tool is a natural complement to its suite of AI-powered compliance automation solutions that allow customers to identify, track, and manage their changing obligations. With Ascent’s regulatory monitoring tool, customers can consume and triage regulatory updates and other content, as well as connect them to their obligations in a streamlined flow. This content includes contemporary updates from regulators regarding COVID-19.

“Despite being in the midst of a global health crisis, regulators are not pausing; they are continuing to publish rule updates, emphasizing some rules over others given the changing market conditions,” said Jeff Heine, Ascent Chief Revenue Officer. “Companies cannot afford to miss those changes, and frankly they have less time to do so. We are committed to helping our customers succeed in this new environment, and that includes enabling firms to comply more cost-effectively than traditional methods.” 

The enhanced regulatory monitoring solution will provide Ascent customers with benefits including: 

  • Regulatory Change Centralization: All rule updates, guidance notes, speeches and other regulatory documents are consolidated in one place. 
  • Efficiencies and Time Saved: Customers can save 20+ hours per regulation in monitoring rule changes from disparate sources.
  • Continuous Horizon Scanning: Customers can more easily anticipate regulatory changes and plan for business impact.
  • Practical Regulatory Themes: Documents are organized by key regulatory themes to reflect how Risk and Compliance Officers actually work.

Using its proprietary RegulationAI™, Ascent processes and analyses regulatory text, doing automatically what takes individual Risk and Compliance officers hundreds of hours to accomplish manually. By delivering actual regulatory knowledge — the regulatory obligations and ongoing rule changes that apply specifically to their business — Ascent helps customers reduce their risk while saving significant time and money. 

Ascent has been rapidly gaining momentum since its founding in 2015. Since its inception, Ascent has grown 100% YOY, secured $26.7M in funding, and expanded to 50+ full-time employees.

Modern challenges require modern tools. Interested in seeing how Ascent can help you automate horizon scanning, change management, and obligations management?

Mar 11
Love2

Ascent Wins 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best RegTech Startup

By Blog

“We’re honored to be included among the many top companies across the FinTech industry to be selected for this year’s FinTech Breakthrough Awards.” —Brian Clark, Founder and CEO, Ascent

Ascent, an AI-driven solution that helps customers automate regulatory compliance, announced today that it has won the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best RegTech Startup. 

FinTech Breakthrough is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies, and products in the global FinTech market through its annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards program. This year’s awards, now in their fourth year, drew over 3,700 nominations.  

Brian Clark, Ascent Founder & CEO, commented, “We’re honored to be included among the many top companies across the FinTech industry to be selected for this year’s FinTech Breakthrough Awards. This win, and the other industry recognition that we continue to receive, is a direct reflection of our commitment to the needs of our customers and helping them achieve certainty in their compliance obligations.”

Using its proprietary RegulationAI™, Ascent processes and analyses regulatory text, doing automatically what takes individual Risk and Compliance officers hundreds of hours to accomplish manually. By delivering actual regulatory knowledge – the regulatory obligations and ongoing rule changes that apply specifically to their business – Ascent helps customers reduce their risk while saving significant time and money. 

In a recent project with global institution CommBank, Ascent used natural language processing (NLP) and AI technologies to interpret and convert over 200,000 words of regulation into a set of digital, easy-to-consume tasks customized for the bank. As a result, CommBank saved hundreds of hours of manual processing across the business.

Ascent has been rapidly gaining momentum since its founding in 2015. Since its inception, Ascent has grown 100% YOY, secured $26.7M in funding, and expanded to 50 full-time employees. Ascent has customers all over the world, from Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks and other financial institutions. Ascent is continually expanding its regulatory coverage in order to better serve its customers worldwide.

To learn more, request a meeting with our Sales team below.


Mar 11
Love1

Digital Disruption: Two Big Shocks to the Industry and What They Mean for Compliance

By Blog

Managing regulatory risk may be business as usual, but the stakes continue to rise.

Few things ramp up pressure on compliance officers more than industry “shocks” — high-volume, high-impact dislocations in the marketplace that render existing regulation inadequate (at best) and cause both regulators and businesses to scramble to put new controls in place.

In this article, we discuss two emerging shocks to the financial industry and how they impact compliance.

Shock #1: The Tech-Fueled Great Acceleration

Technology is at the root of virtually every recent shock to the financial industry affecting compliance.

For awhile, incumbents saw tech as a band-aid for legacy problems and inefficiencies. Now, however, technology is viewed as the necessary bedrock of the industry.

This mindset drives the financial industry toward a Great Acceleration: faster, more efficient interactions with clients and counterparties, faster flow of capital between institutions and across borders, and faster execution of trades and strategies.

Regulators and Firms Struggle to Keep Pace

For compliance departments, the Great Acceleration poses a huge risk.

The fact that regulators (and even many market participants) are still coming to grips with new technologies and products – e.g., AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, data privacy, and cybersecurity – will not slow the pace of innovation.

Existing regulations will increasingly fail to respond to market conditions, making compliance difficult by virtue of a frequent disconnect between market rules and practices.

What’s more, as markets continue to innovate much faster than regulators can respond, new regulations will grow obsolete faster and faster.

One area in which the Great Acceleration has caused particular pain for compliance officers is the realm of “know your customer” (KYC) and other anti-money laundering (AML) compliance obligations. Investigative and reporting obligations have turned compliance departments into what amount to private law enforcement operations.

Already, firms face substantial fines for working in embargoed or sanctioned jurisdictions. As the volume and speed of trades and capital flows increase, these compliance and investigative obligations will continue to trend toward greater complexity and risk.

RegTech Boosts Compliance Speed and Efficiency

RegTech solutions can help relieve the shock of the Great Acceleration by doing in minutes what would take humans hundreds of hours.

For example, AI-driven technology can help regulators understand their impact across regions more quickly, making rule-making potentially more efficient and effective.

Similarly, RegTech has a massive role to play in helping financial firms pick through  increasingly detailed and onerous regulations that often (albeit unintentionally) suppress value-creation to a far greater extent than they deter wrongdoing.

Emerging solutions will help firms automate KYC data collection, monitor capital flows and trading patterns, and report suspicious behavior to regulators and prosecutors.

Shock #2: The Shift to an All-Digital Environment

Another significant shock we’re experiencing in the financial world involves the tidal-wave shift in consumer demand toward a “digitally native” investing and financial management experience.

The FinTech boom has begun to transform entire business models by catering to that demand. Businesses have a choice to either stagnate or adapt to meet the needs and changing expectations of new customers.

No Market Niche Left Untouched

It’s difficult to overstate the breadth of change the demand for a fully-digital experience will continue to bring to the marketplace.

As it has in so many other industries affected by the digital revolution, the shift to an entirely digital mode of accessing and consuming financial products and services will require firms to innovate and re-create physical goods and services in the digital realm.

The shift has already spurred entirely new business sectors in banking (e.g., challenger “virtual” banks), money (crytpo, obviously), and payments (which grew so large, so fast, it already feels like a mature business model by today’s standards).

With the exception of the early “e-banks,” none of these businesses existed at the turn of the century, and many weren’t even around at the beginning of the 2010s.

RegTech Leverages AI to Reshape Compliance Roles

For every market sector and asset class affected, the rate and pace of regulatory changes and downstream compliance efforts will also increase, putting pressure on compliance departments to keep up.

That won’t be easy.

Firms will face difficulty following, tracking, and complying with all the new rules and regulations that emerge. The sort of over-regulation typical of an industry in transition seems inevitable, as does the risk of harsh penalties for non-compliance.

The only way to stay ahead of the frequency and growing complexity of regulatory change, and to protect firms from feeling the wrath of regulators, will be to shift much of the work traditionally done by humans onto machines.

The function of human compliance staff must change from rote collection and manual sifting of data to higher-level review and analysis of machine-generated reports.

AI and natural language processing will take over the heavy lifting of analyzing regulatory text, freeing up compliance officers to concentrate their efforts on relationship-building and overseeing the safety of the firm from the perspective of strategic decision-making.