The robo compliance officer

RegTech is being billed as ‘The new FinTech’, and can offer valuable intelligence as well as efficiencies, through the automation of processes and the analysis of big data. Yet is there a danger that robotic compliance could turn compliance… ‘robotic’? asks Adam Samuel.

Adam SamuelBA LLM DipPFS MCISI FCIArb Certs CII (MP&ER) Barrister and Attorney may be contacted at adamsamuel@aol.com. His book, ‘Complaints and Compensation: a Guide to the Financial Services Market’, is available from his website, www.adamsamuel.com.

There have been a spate of suggestions about how ‘robo-advice’ and other similar uses of IT could be used to make firms more compliant or efficient. Robo-compliance has been a new one recently. All these ideas miss an obvious point, that information technology has been helping firms with their compliance for many years. You can ask a computer to tell you when certain exceptions have been spotted, or processes left incomplete or at least not inputted. We can utilise it to find dangerous terms or phrases. Firms use simple input data to identify transactions that go beyond the norm. The regulator forces firms to input huge amounts of data to tell it about the industry. However, the conversation has moved on from this to one about whether there exists a potential robo-compliance officer.