Forget documents; it’s all about the obligations
Today, many financial services organizations rely on horizon scanning tools to manage the constant flow of regulatory information and updates. These tools automatically collect every document from every covered regulator, enabling teams to access critical information.
However, horizon scanning tools only address the first (and easiest) part of the regulatory change management process. The hard part is still up to you, including:
- Determining whether the regulatory change is relevant to your business: This involves manually reading every sentence of complex regulatory text to understand applicability. This can be a substantial waste of time for teams if the update doesn’t apply, but reading the text is the only way to find out.
- Identifying your specific obligations within relevant rules: When a regulatory update is deemed relevant, it requires even closer manual review to find the 30% to 40% of text that specifically defines the obligations (requirements) that you must fulfill.
- Determining how and where updated obligations impact your business: This involves getting relevant information to various individuals throughout the enterprise, comparing current obligations against new obligations to determine required changes, and then incorporating those changes into your policies and controls and/or your GRC.
With horizon scanning tools, you must repeat these steps with every new rule and every rule change. You essentially start from scratch every time, repeating arduous, manual processes.
An obligation-based approach to compliance is a revolutionary change to the manual, document-driven process. This approach begins not with the raw document text, but with your specific regulatory obligations.
AscentAI begins with a process that creates a highly accurate, rock-solid register of your enterprise obligations—a bulletproof obligations inventory. You no longer start each regulatory change from scratch. Instead, AscentAI’s change management tool examines every new rule in the context of your existing, accurate inventory, ensuring you only see relevant information.
With its obligations-based approach, AscentAI is purpose-built to fully automate the regulatory change management lifecycle—from collecting new regulatory information, to identifying your specific impacted obligations thereunder, to distributing and alerting to relevant individuals, right through to propagating changes within your GRC platform.
