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Oct 08
Love1

Ascent Forms Industry Advisory Council (IAC)

By Blog

“We are honored by [the Council’s] commitment to help Ascent grow and advance its mission of becoming the world’s leading RegTech provider of compliance automation solutions.” —Brian Clark, Founder & CEO, Ascent

Ascent has announced formation of its Industry Advisory Council (IAC) to provide external industry expertise and high-level advice to the company’s management with regards to strategy, execution, and overall global growth of Ascent. Led by Ascent Founder and CEO Brian Clark, the IAC is comprised of top industry leaders and subject matter experts in the financial and regulatory space.

“We are thrilled to start work with the members of our Industry Advisory Council,” said Clark. “As top minds in their fields, they will provide insight into not only the everyday challenges of Risk and Compliance practitioners, but also the broader movement of financial compliance as an industry and how we can position Ascent within that tidal shift in order to best serve our growing customer base. We are honored by their commitment to help Ascent grow and advance its mission of becoming the world’s leading RegTech provider of compliance automation solutions.”

The four members of the IAC are:

Nirvana Farhadi

Nirvana Farhadi is a thought leader and pioneer in the RegTech sector, with over 20 years of experience in financial services. She is a global RegTech influencer, author, and keynote speaker with an expertise in compliance, operations and risk. In her current role as Global Head, Financial Services RegTech, Risk & Regulatory Compliance Affairs, Nirvana is the business owner and strategic leader for the organization’s Financial Services RegTech business. As the former Head of Regulatory Reporting at KPMG, she has led the business, practice, and development for Regulatory Transaction Reporting as well as a number of other reporting requirements.

David Rudis

David Rudis spent over 30 years at LaSalle National Bank and its predecessor bank based in Chicago where he was part of the top executive team that took LaSalle from a small, struggling bank in the early 1980s to a highly profitable, super regional market share leader that was sold to Bank of America for $21 billion in 2007.  Following the sale, David stayed on as president of BofA Illinois and also as the executive in charge of BofA’s national debit card and checking businesses. David is currently vice-chairman of the board of the Acorn Wanger Mutual Funds as well as lead director of First Hospitality, a U.S. developer, owner and manager of hotels.

Scott Gordon

Under Mr. Gordon’s 15-year leadership, Rosenthal Collins Group, LLC (“RCG”) was one of the nation’s leading independent futures brokerage and clearing firms. He currently is Chairman of XF, LLC where he is assisting the former RCG owners in winding down their operations. As Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) from 1998 to 2002, he guided the exchange through the development and execution of a strategic plan that transformed it from a mutual membership organization to a for-profit stock corporation, the first U.S. financial exchange to take this step. Mr. Gordon previously served as President and Chief Operating Officer of a Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi futures brokerage subsidiary. | LinkedIn

Ian Hollowbread

Ian Hollowbread was appointed Head of RegTech Labs in January 2019. Ian is globally responsible for RegTech within ING Labs, with a focus on supporting and investing in early stage companies to help address regulatory compliance and proactively protect the financial system at large. Ian is an accomplished change manager, with over 15 years of experience across service, operations and regulatory environments. He also brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of post-trade infrastructure and innovation. Ian is an active member of ING U.K.’s Innovation Council and has had responsibility of defining strategy and transformation under ING’s Chief Administrators office function. Most recently, Ian served as Chair to the Association of Foreign Banks RegTech Group, and he promotes ecosystem building efforts to help solve some of the fundamental challenges to technology adoption.

 

Read more about Ascent in the News.

Oct 01
Love2

Time Travel: The True Power of Developers

By Blog

As developers, this is the power we possess: to set the stage of the future.  If we’re careless or oblivious about this power we’ll be continually tripping over our feet; when we wield it with intention and foresight we can achieve any future we envision.

By Chris Doyle, CTO

In Abstraction is Art: Why All Programmers are Creatives, I described the central role abstractions play in technology and technical companies. This post builds on those ideas to discuss how innovation works in the medium of abstractions.

Progression: Advancing Abstractions

The tools we use both limit and advance our thinking. If I gave you a hammer and asked you to build a birdhouse, I’d probably get something like this:

 

But if I gave you scissors, you might build a birdhouse like this instead:

You could have found your own hammer and built a wooden birdhouse anyway, but the scissors put you in a certain mindset. In software our tools are abstractions (a specific type of idea) and the same concept applies.

In Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 society is being oppressed under the watchful eye of Big Brother. Their subjugation is so complete that even thinking about rebelling against the government is a crime. They are no longer able to articulate revolt, communicate about revolt, plot revolt, or eventually even IMAGINE revolt; they are no longer able to revolt. Over time, the very concept of rebellion is lost.

To “unlock” this ability, they would need to awkwardly describe it using combinations of existing ideas until they solidify the concept, name the concept, and finally evangelize the concept and the names to the rest of the population. Only then would revolt become possible again.

Our Responsibility

When we accurately anticipate the future, our progress accelerates because each step is built on top of a previous enabling idea instead of starting from scratch each time.

As programmers we have the opportunity to build our own tools, our own abstractions, our own language – and this gives us tremendous power and responsibility.  Every decision has a cascading effect, making certain things easier and certain things harder. We make dozens of decisions every day as we write code, and those decisions move us closer and further away from any given feature we might want to build in the future. Our requirements just said “birdhouse,” but once we make a birdhouse, is the business going to ask us to expand into bird apartments (probably easier in wood) or allow customers to request custom sizes (probably easier in fabric)?

We have to solve today’s problem while simultaneously anticipating tomorrow’s needs. There’s a careful balance between thinking ahead and overengineering, giving rise to terms like YAGNI (“you ain’t gonna need it”). But thinking and building are two different things – it’s always worth thinking a couple steps ahead so you don’t paint yourself into a corner. When we accurately anticipate the future, our progress accelerates because each step is built on top of a previous enabling idea instead of starting from scratch each time.

How do we get better at predicting the future? Context.

Context as Binoculars

If we’re doing our jobs right, we’re making decisions with the full awareness of a wide variety of contexts. The more information we can bring to bear in each decision, and the more deeply we can empathize with the stakeholders providing that information, the more accurately we can imagine futures that anticipate the needs of our constituents.

So what exactly are these “contexts” that are so important? There are a few that are fundamental. You have to have a really solid grasp of the technology you’re working with, and how the technical landscape is changing. Understanding the customer is paramount; they’re the ultimate arbiter of whether you’re creating value. It’s critical to understand your company’s business model and how it fits into the broader market. Ultimately anything that helps you understand your particular problem domain and solution space is going to serve you well. Side note: this is why diversity is critical. Someone brings the context they gained in a college CS program, someone else brings the context from their artistic background, and someone else brings the context from their time in sales or customer support.

Luckily, guessing the future is only half the picture. As developers, we can have a strong influence on how the future unfolds.

Progression is Vision

A house starts with a foundation, then the scaffolding of the walls, then the plumbing/electrical, then the drywall, then the plaster, then the paint, then the furniture.  In the earliest stages we can barely see it’s going to become a house, but the architect has a plan. Over time we start to get a rough idea of the finished product, but there are still many questions to be answered.  Eventually, we’re living in the space and trying to figure out how to position our couch around the weird angle in our living room wall.

When our abstractions come together into a larger whole, we’ve created a framework, a conceptual model.  It stands under its own weight; it has internal consistency; it has structure and shape and boundaries, strengths and weaknesses, characteristics like any physical object.  Rather than starting from scratch on every new problem, we instead think about which parts of our framework are relevant and how we can refine them to apply in this new situation.  Maybe we repurpose a guest room into a nursery, or build a deck so we can grill and relax outside – our options aren’t always easy, but it’s hard to justify a new house for every new need so we find a way to make it work.

Because future questions are answered inside the framework, the framework sets the direction for future conversation long in advance.  It frames the discussion before the discussion even begins. As developers, this is the power we possess: to set the stage of the future.  If we’re careless or oblivious about this power we’ll be continually tripping over our feet; when we wield it with intention and foresight we can achieve any future we envision.

Building Futures

At Ascent, we’re framing the future of regulatory compliance. Our vision is to shift the conversation about regulation from quantity to quality by by reducing the burden of compliance.  We’re making it easier for companies to understand the regulatory landscape, which allows a new focus on efficacy and value instead of cost. We’re making it cheaper for new companies to get started, bringing healthy competition to the financial service sector.  We’re even working with regulators, to help them align rules across jurisdictions. Ultimately we see regulation as a foundational component of a healthy ecosystem, and we’re doing our best to both anticipate and create that future.

Interested in joining the Ascent team? Check out our open roles below!

Careers

 

Sep 05
Love1

The Rise of Regulatory Sandboxes and What They Signal for Financial Firms

By Blog, Featured

“The entire industry takes its cues from the regulators. Therefore, we know with certainty that digitalization is not a trend, but a permanent paradigm shift that every firm will need to embrace, or be left behind.” 

The word “sandbox” has over the years experienced an intriguing evolution. The tech world saw the word morph into a term meaning a closed environment for testing digital or web-based projects; now in the same digital universe, the word also refers to a “regulatory sandbox” — an environment for testing new business models insulated from current regulations. 

The first regulatory sandbox was formed in the U.K. in 2014: Project Innovate, which would serve as a model for subsequent sandboxes. In the U.S., Arizona became the first state to sanction a regulatory sandbox, and Illinois is currently considering enacting one. 

Experts have generally viewed regulation and innovation as inherent adversaries. A sandbox can be seen, though, as a sort of compromise where innovative ideas are tested in the absence of outright regulation while still preserving consumer protections. A sandbox helps companies with unique business ideas avoid the trappings of traditional compliance while still adhering to any regulations already in place.

READ ARTICLE: Building Regulation AI: Solving Compliance in the Age of AI

 

The Origin of GFIN

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the U.K. had advanced the idea in 2018, along with eleven other regulatory groups, of a global sandbox, a fintech term for an environment designed for testing technological ideas on a global level. The concept became a reality, resulting in the creation of a conglomerate of 38 organizations called the Global Financial Innovation Network (GFIN). The initiative listed its three purposes as follows:

— To give companies an environment conducive to testing international solutions.

— To unite regulators so they could discuss new business models and technologies, as well as provide companies with regulatory information.

 — To provide a venue for policy discussions.

Responses to the initial idea of a global sandbox included a concern that the project be just in its dealings with those who want to test across international borders, along with other issues like blockchain technology, data protection, artificial intelligence, regulation of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and securities.

Responses also included enthusiasm over how quickly news of such technological innovations encryption technology would reach the global marketplace, interest in cooperation among regulators on common issues that companies must face across different jurisdictions, with a focus on the challenges bilateral relationships between companies and regulators face, and interest in providing businesses and regulators an environment where they could discuss policy issues.

“Many regulators around the world are themselves embracing technology, as seen by the global rise of regulatory ‘sandboxes’ and other initiatives like ASIC’s Innovation Hub in Australia,” said Dean Patzer, Ascent’s Director of Solutions Engineering, who previously served as Senior Compliance Officer and then as Capital Markets Vice President at BMO.  “The entire industry takes its cues from the regulators. Therefore, we know with certainty that digitalization is not a trend, but a permanent paradigm shift that every firm will need to embrace, or be left behind.”

The FCA announced in April the proposed creation of a cross-border pilot program to test new technologies under GFIN. Ascent, an AI-driven platform that provides insight to customers on regulatory responsibilities, was one of eight solution providers selected for consideration in the trial program. A pioneer in RegulationAI, Ascent works with regulators the world over, including the U.S., the United Kingdom, Asia and Australia. 

READ ARTICLE: Ascent Selected by GFIN for Regulatory Cross-Border Pilot

 

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

Request a Demo


Aug 26
Love2

Growth Journey: From Customer Success to Product Management

By Blog, Culture

[It’s] such a refreshing feeling to have people who believed in my ability to support such an essential role in the company. I strive to perfect the art of Product Management and to continue to utilize my technical experience paired with my understanding of our customers from my time in Customer Success.

By Sura Giuffreda, Product Manager

Little did I know that my first day at Ascent would lead me in finding my perfect career path! I walked in the office one year ago, unsure about how my new role in Customer Success would be. However, this story isn’t about Customer Success but rather my journey to Product Manager.

Prior to beginning my time at Ascent, I was working as a Geophysicist for 5 years. I was ready to dive into something new and exciting. When I first learned about Ascent, the one thing I knew was that I was excited about the work that was being done and that I would get the opportunity to  directly shape a product that would change the game of compliance. I had to be a part of it.

Customer Success gave me the opportunity to highlight my interests in people and managing projects however, throughout my time working with customers, it became very clear to me that my technical brain wanted to solve problems and provide results in a different way. To be able to help our customers and solve their problems, I needed to know the product inside and out. For me to know the product, I needed to know the details of every gear in this well oiled machine- even now I am learning something new everyday!

An opportunity arose for me to officially pursue the role of Product Manager for our Customer Application. I received support for this pivot across the management team and from my peers. It was such a refreshing feeling to have people who believed in my ability to support such an essential role in the company. I strive to perfect the art of Product Management and to continue to utilize my technical experience paired with my understanding of our customers from my time in Customer Success. I’ve enjoyed my time in Product Management thus far, and I strongly believe I have finally found a career path that compliments me!

 

Interested in joining the Ascent team? Check out our open roles below!

Careers

 

Aug 26
Love1

European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR) Now Available on Ascent

By Blog

Ascent announced today that its platform now includes the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR). EMIR affects businesses in the EU and is directed at over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives markets, central counterparties (parties which interpose themselves as a focal point between trade deals), and trade repositories (where records of trades are collected and maintained). EMIR establishes common rules for central counterparties and trade repositories, requiring qualified entities to report all derivatives contracts entered into a trade repository. Implemented by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), EMIR is intended to reduce systemic counterparty and operational risk, and help prevent future financial system collapses.  

In 2015, the European Commission (EC) conducted an assessment of EMIR, which found that the regulation imposed overly complex and disproportionate burdens to non-financial counterparties, small financial counterparties and pension funds. Amendments to the regulation made in an effort to address these issues – known as EMIR Refit – were published in May 2019 and applied 20 days following publication i.e. 17 June 2019. EMIR Refit expanded the sphere of Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs) formerly considered as financial counterparties (FC) by EMIR. Equally, the change is significant in application due to the linkage between several obligations listed under EMIR and the subsequent classification of an entity more so as an FC. 

Ascent’s AI-driven solutions make it easier for financial firms to assess regulatory changes and their impact to the business. Using artificial intelligence, Ascent automatically curates the regulatory obligations and rule changes that apply to each specific customer, which are then linked to the customer’s daily compliance tasks, controls, and policies and procedures. This targeted regulatory knowledge enables businesses to more efficiently and accurately assess and mitigate risk. 

Modern challenges require modern tools. Interested in seeing how Ascent can help you stay ahead of changing regulation? Request a demo below.

Request a Demo


Aug 10
Love2

Abstraction is Art: Why All Programmers are Creatives

By Blog, Tech

In order for computers to be useful in our rich and meaningful world, we need to bridge the gap somehow. As programmers, we need a way to keep our feet in both worlds at once. That bridge is abstraction.

By Chris Doyle, CTO

Humans have always built on top of the work of those who came before us. Karl Benz was able to invent cars because he had the wheel and the combustion engine. Orville and Wilbur Wright were able to invent planes because they had gliders and bicycle chains. They were successful because they looked at the world around them and brought existing ideas together in a new way.

The technological acceleration we’ve seen in the last 50 years is driven by the same principle of building on previous work, with one important difference: our production costs have fallen to zero. Henry Ford had to build factories to realize his ideas. General Motors and Rolls Royce had to build concrete bunkers to test their jet engines in case they exploded. Programmers need only open their laptop and get to work. Without production costs, the cycle of innovation now happens at the speed of thought.

Almost.

There’s still some friction in the cycle, and it’s basically because computers are not smart. Fast? Yes: we can tell them “do x, do y, do z” and they’ll do it in milliseconds – but they have no idea WHY. But we have our reasons, right? We ask them to add the numbers in a spreadsheet because those numbers represent our income and expenses, so the sum represents our profit. We ask them to send a paragraph of text to our friends because that paragraph represents a funny thing that happened at work.

WE know the whys, because the whys are part of our world. The computers don’t know the whys, because the world of the computer is incredibly limited. Computers are still literally dealing with ones and zeroes, and could not be further away from our messy experience of hugs and giraffes and hot chocolate.

In order for computers to be useful in our rich and meaningful world, we need to bridge the gap somehow. As programmers, we need a way to keep our feet in both worlds at once. That bridge is abstraction.

What Is Abstraction?

Think of a car. Got one? I bet it has four wheels and an engine. “Car” is an abstraction, a generalized idea. As a society, we’ve communally decided that wheels and engines are important parts of all cars. Is it blue or red or black? Who cares. Color doesn’t fundamentally change the thing we’re talking about, whereas something with wheels and no engine might be a bicycle rather than a car. Since color is not important when we’re talking about cars, it hasn’t become part of the abstraction.

For a computer to handle our complex world, we have to simplify — and we simplify by just leaving stuff out. It’s much easier to tell a computer about our Platonic ideal of a “car” – four wheels and an engine – instead of every single minor detail and variation in the actual cars in the actual world. As programmers we also know which properties of a car are useful for our particular task, and that’s how we choose what to include and what to leave out. If we’re running a race track, we might want our computers to know about top speeds and RPMs. If we’re running a rideshare company, our biggest concern is the number of seats.

We give the computer a limited view, but we ourselves still have a full world of knowledge. This duality is what makes programming possible; the same abstraction can be simple and “machine-readable” while also being emotional, subjective, and yes – artistic.

Art Is Abstraction Is Art

Abstractions afford us limitless opportunity to explore, build, learn, and communicate.

Artists are trying to represent a particular slice of the world through a specific perspective. In holding a mirror to society, they selectively include or exclude certain details and ideas to present an opinionated view. Even a photograph – an “exact replication” of the world – has an opinion by way of subject matter, framing, editing, and the context of its display. Art, then, is an abstraction. It’s an idea, stripped of all its nonconsequential details to highlight its core.

Creating and experiencing art helps us understand ourselves. It allows us to experiment, to learn, to fail, to try another way. This boundless exploration extends beyond the physical world as well: we can delve into love, loss, or any aspect of the human experience without going through those events directly.

The same way a novel, poem, dance, or painting captures the world, so do abstractions.  Perhaps the closest comparison is to storytelling. Stories are full of complex devices for manipulating ideas. Metaphor, allegory, fantasy. A story allows us to construct new realities through imagination. Stories are powerful because they connect with our deepest selves, and through the details we choose to include or omit, they have a point of view.  Abstractions similarly afford us limitless opportunity to explore, build, learn, and communicate.

So What Is Programming?

While computers themselves might be governed by math and equations, programming computers is primarily a creative, subjective, artistic activity.

Artists create sketches, drafts, studies, and yet the final work is not always as imagined. Artistic ideals are sometimes subverted for a paid commission. Programming is not always joyful or meaningful either, but programming is always an artistic endeavor. It’s fully subjective, it’s based in the realm of ideas, it’s an act of creation, and it involves the creator holding an opinionated mirror up to the world.

Thinking of programming as a technical endeavor is correct but woefully insufficient. This is why so many of the best programmers I’ve worked with have significant artistic backgrounds, and why I always say anyone can learn to code.

As in any discipline, programmers stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us. In programming, those previous works are works of abstraction. The earliest programmers were truly writing programs with ones and zeroes. But someone abstracted those ones and zeroes into english characters, and abstracted those english characters into software instructions. Over the decades, countless thousands of developers have slowly advanced programming languages to the point where many programs do read somewhat like prose. They have created networking libraries, databases, web browsers, apps. Each of these abstractions is built on the abstractions before it, and the work of every programmer is to use existing abstractions and their own ingenuity to create new works.

Programming classes/books/blogs/etc usually focus directly on code, which isn’t entirely surprising – a group of potters would probably focus on clay, too. The code is what’s sitting in front of us; it’s obvious. Abstraction is less obvious, yet far more important. I will go so far as to say that abstraction, not code, is the fundamental medium of programming. And thus, while computers themselves might be governed by math and equations, programming computers is primarily a creative, subjective, artistic activity.

Where It Applies

Ascent is no exception; in fact, abstractions are even more important here than at many other places I’ve worked.  Our business is based on creating valuable regulatory data sets from publicly available sources, and the only way to do that is to advance our understanding more quickly and efficiently than our competition.  Most developers don’t know anything about regulation, so we collaborate closely with in-house legal domain experts. Lawyers and developers all come to the table with their own experiences, education, industrial norms, ideas – and yes, abstractions.  In order to collaborate, we have to find shared abstractions to translate between our two worlds. It requires a little more give and take than a traditional software-only team, but allows us to solve problems neither group would be able to address independently. Ultimately, the abstractions we build together create the platform for collaboration and innovation at Ascent.

Read Part 2 — Time Travel: The True Power of Developers

 

Interested in joining the Ascent team? Check out our open roles below!

Careers

 

Jul 29
Love1

Staying Ahead of Reg BI: The SEC Clarifies Standards of Conduct for Broker-Dealers and Investment Advisors  

By Blog

Public confusion about the different roles that Broker-Dealers and Investment Advisors play prompted the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to issue an Interpretive Release outlining The Standard of Conduct for Investment Advisors. 

Released on June 5, 2019, its main objectives were to enhance customer (i.e. investor) decision-making and protection in large part by helping customers better understand the roles (and differences between) Broker-Dealers and Investment Advisors. In general, customers could be harmed if they are confused by how Broker-Dealers and Investment Advisors may have conflicting financial interests of their own. 

According to the Proposed Rule: Regulation Best Interest or Reg BI, a Broker-Dealer making a recommendation of a specific securities transaction or investment strategy must always act in the best interest of the customer (what satisfies “best interest” is outlined in the rule).

Meanwhile, Investment Advisors owe a fiduciary duty to their clients which – while similar to best interest — includes a duty of care and loyalty. This is reflective of the nature of the relationship between Investment Advisors and their clients which tends to require a higher level of trust over a longer period of time. 

Stay Ahead of Reg BI Compliance with Ascent

The key to staying current on Reg BI or any other SEC-issued rules is a compliance program that evolves with new regulations. 

Ascent provides you with a feed of regulatory changes (including those related to Reg BI) that apply to your firm, helps you visualize how the rule text has changed, and indicates whether that change impacts your existing controls, policies and procedures. 

Ascent also serves as a central repository for all regulator documents so you can easily search for speeches, guidelines or other releases concerning Reg BI, allowing for comprehensive research.

READ ARTICLE: How Ascent Simplifies Regulatory Change Management with Automation

 

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Jul 23
Love1

Unleashing Wealth Managers with the Power of RegTech

By Blog

Wealth management, like every sector of the financial industry, has come in for its share of regulatory attention in recent years. Whereas the challenge of leveraging “big data” to find hidden insights dominated conversations among wealth management professionals ten years ago, industry discussions today center around complying with KYC (“know your customer”) rules and defending the suitability of investment recommendations.

As regulatory requirements have broadened and deepened across asset classes and jurisdictions, they have inflicted an increasingly heavy tax on wealth managers to ensure compliance and to keep their clients (and themselves) out of trouble.

In many ways, the growth of the regulatory burden constitutes the hidden underbelly of the FinTech boom. Distilling opportunity from an ocean of data is one thing. Exploiting that opportunity while staying on the right side of regulations can be quite another.

New RegTech ventures have stepped into the breach to support wealth managers in meeting regulatory compliance obligations. Here are a few of the ways they’re changing the wealth management landscape.

Untangling Complex Regulations to Unleash Business Potential

Regulatory text constitutes a dense, confusing stew of proscriptions and obligations written in a language foreign to most readers. Digesting and making sense of a single requirement applicable to a single asset class in a single jurisdiction takes time, patience, and a patience for complexity.

There simply aren’t enough hours in the day for individual wealth managers to absorb and implement regulation on their own, try as they might. And so, ingrained and intractable regulatory complexity inflicts a dual risk: for any given trade, an asset manager risks non-compliance with the regulations he or she knows about, and also risks not knowing about all of the regulations that may apply. 

Enter AI-driven compliance management solutions like Ascent.

Ascent is leading the way in the development of a new class of technology that teaches machines to parse and analyze regulatory text. What takes humans hours to (barely) absorb takes an AI-driven algorithm mere minutes to dissect and analyze.

These solutions hold the promise of revolutionizing wealth management by substantially reducing the risk of non-compliance and ignorance of regulatory applicability. In time, they will be able to tell wealth managers, in advance of a trade and in plain language, exactly which regulations apply to an investment strategy and exactly how to execute it in compliance with the law.

In so doing, RegTech solutions will enable FinTech/big data to achieve its full potential, freeing managers to pursue investment strategies without the fear of non-compliance. 

READ ARTICLE: How Ascent Simplifies Regulatory Change Management with Automation

 

Facilitating Compliance Management

RegTech also has its sights set on facilitating core compliance management tasks. For example, there are already solutions on the market (and more in the pipeline) to automate anti-money laundering efforts, such as conducting multi-jurisdictional screening of customers and identifying the beneficial ownership of investment vehicles (even those formed offshore). By building data networks that increase investor transparency, RegTechs promise to take the guesswork and relative risk out of doing business with a new customer in a new jurisdiction.

Likewise, RegTech solutions can help marry two related and increasingly-important regulatory functions: KYC data collection and suitability analysis. Not only can they facilitate and automate the collection of critical KYC information directly from new customers and from third-party data networks, compliance management solutions can also parse that information and derive insight about whether an investment strategy fits an investor’s profile and long-term objectives. 

Finally, RegTech continues to develop new and better ways to streamline compliance reporting. Existing and emerging solutions generate reports automatically, making filing much more efficient. Increasingly, RegTech delivers value for wealth managers by developing tools that recognize and flag issues (trading patterns, capital flows, etc.) that will likely attract regulatory scrutiny, giving firms the opportunity to tackle a thorny problem before an inspector from the SEC or FCA comes calling.

READ ARTICLE: Exam Time? Tips from a Former Regulator on How to Prepare

 

Speeding Up and Adding Precision To Rule-Making

The same compliance automation solutions that help asset managers understand and comply with regulations will also soon be put to use crafting and testing new regulations. New technology will help eliminate the vexing problem of inconsistent or contradictory provisions by giving regulators and other stakeholders the ability to see an entire body of regulations from “30,000 feet” and to model how changing regulatory text here will have an impact on obligations over there. They will also create a more streamlined process of collaborative rule-making, linking all stakeholders together and giving them the tools to track and analyze proposed amendments in real-time.

In facilitating insight, efficiency, and collaboration in rule-making, RegTech solutions also hold the promise to do something greater: they will help develop regulators develop rules that actually address market conditions as they exist at the time of a final rule issuance, instead of the conditions that existed when the lengthy rule-making process began (but have since evolved). This will in turn allow for less costly, more precise rules, eliminating market inefficiencies that result from overbroad rules that throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater by inhibiting legitimate investment much more than they prevent illegitimate practices. 

READ ARTICLE: Ascent Selected by GFIN for Regulatory Cross-Border Pilot

 

Ascent Leads the Way

At Ascent, we strive to develop regulatory change management and compliance management solutions that free wealth managers and other financial industry professionals from the time-consuming, expensive task of regulatory compliance, so that they can do what they do best: build relationships, develop business, and implement the wisdoms gleaned from their technology backend.

LEARN MORE: Click here to learn about Ascent Solutions.

 

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Jul 16
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End-to-End Compliance is Closer Than You Think: How Businesses Can Get a Practical Head Start

By Blog

As advances in technology give rise to new ways of approaching age-old problems, a new term has begun to surface, one that will no doubt dominate the global dialogue around compliance in very short time: End-to-End Compliance.

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Up until very recently, the only possible compliance process was by its nature a fragmented one. Typically, it’s myriad steps, activities, and tasks are handled across disparate systems and are further complicated by the fact that compliance work travels through several departments and lines of business.

There have been a few attempts at partial automation to help unify these efforts, including widespread use of Excel spreadsheets, GRCs, and various point solutions. Even with these tools in place, however, businesses have fallen prey to the gaps inherent in such a disjointed environment, negatively impacting their ability to keep up with regulatory events, implement policy internally, and provide clear evidence of compliance to auditors. 

As advances in technology give rise to new ways of approaching age-old problems, a new term has begun to surface, one that will no doubt dominate the global dialogue around compliance in very short time: End-to-End (E2E) Compliance. 

Due to its relative newness, the term is often met with mixed emotions — excitement, but also skepticism and confusion over what exactly constitutes E2E Compliance and how it can be achieved practically.

Defining E2E Compliance

At its core, E2E simply describes a process that takes a service from beginning to end, delivering a complete functional system. 

E2E Compliance is a fully traceable process that connects external regulatory events to a business’ specific obligations, then all the way through to that business’ internal controls, policies, and procedures. 

This process, which can only be achieved through automation, covers both existing regulations and new rules or changes, thereby integrating horizon scanning and change management into the overall flow. 

In an ideal E2E system, businesses could 1) be alerted to relevant new rules or changes to existing rules, 2) be directed to the exact parts of their internal controls or P&Ps that are impacted so team members can make the appropriate changes, 3) manage their obligations digitally, 4) easily produce records of their compliance activities, and 5) generate useful reporting dashboards. 

E2E as a Pathway to Better Business 

A study of other industries provides us with much encouragement about the achievability of E2E.

E2E unlocks a number of exciting opportunities. Automating the bulk of the manual tasks that plague the process, like scouring the web for regulatory changes and connecting them to internal policies, will save significant time and reduce the risk of errors that could lead to undesired consequences including fines, suspensions, reputational damage. Alerts help drive action that will allow companies to stay ahead of regulation. Automated audit trails and reporting capabilities bring much-needed relief to regulatory examinations. Overall, there are more ways to knit the process together than ever before without requiring so much laborious, manual work to see results.

A study of other industries provides us with much encouragement about the achievability of E2E. Marketing was one of, if not the first, industries to widely adopt automation and AI technologies on a massive scale. Literally thousands of MarTech solutions are available today that help businesses compile a 360 degree view of their customers and to produce and distribute hyper-targeted marketing messages based on demography, geography, behavior, intent, and a whole slew of other markers that would be impossible to tap into without some form of automation. 

The shipping and logistics industry has also made incredible advancements due in no small part to innovation powerhouses like Amazon. An E2E shipping and logistics process today combines multiple, integrated solutions to track and manage inventory, storage, and distribution, giving the business complete visibility into every minute detail, down to whether one of their trucks turns right or left — or more importantly, whether that truck should turn right or left depending on traffic patterns and delivery schedules.

As industries like marketing and shipping have been transformed by E2E, so will it be for compliance. The only question that remains is not necessarily of when, but of how. 

A Practical Approach

That a variety of solutions are available is an advantage as it allows firms to build a fully integrated technology stack that is unique and optimal for their specific business. 

The most common misconception that financial firms have about E2E Compliance is that it can be accomplished with one vendor. While an attractive vision, it’s one that is simply unattainable (at least in the foreseeable future) considering the massive complexity and scope of regulation.

On its face, this may seem like a disheartening and unwelcome truth, but again we can take cues from industries like marketing and shipping. Both have fully embraced both automation and the concept of E2E and yet no single one-size-fits-all solution dominates either market; quite the contrary in fact. That a variety of solutions are available — and this applies to regulatory technology as well — is an advantage as it allows firms to build a fully integrated technology stack that is unique and optimal for their specific business. 

The first step businesses must take on the pathway to E2E Compliance is to outline their processes and engage with the market to identify which aspects are possible to automate. Firms will find, as we have, that the upfront lift of regulatory research and analysis can certainly be automated, along with a number of other points in the process that RegTechs of all shapes and sizes today are ready to address. 

Ascent can play an integral part in E2E Compliance by providing customers with the ability to automatically identify the obligations and ongoing rule changes that apply to their specific business, then to connect that regulatory knowledge to their other systems via automation. Ascent achieves this on a level of granularity and scale that simply was not possible a decade ago.

As the market leaders in developing Regulation AI — artificial intelligence built uniquely for the regulatory compliance industry — Ascent is forging a new path to help our customers in the financial services industry not only automate and scale their compliance programs, but to make E2E Compliance a reality rather than a vision of a faraway future.

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Jul 01
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Better by Design (Thinking): How We Combine Sprints with Customer-Obsession to Drive Product

By Blog, Culture, Tech

At Ascent, we strive to approach each and every challenge with this mindset that promotes first of all empathy, then understanding, then innovation, and finally a “best-fit” solution.

By Subha Sriram, VP Product 

A design thinking mindset is perhaps one of the most important assets for a company as it searches for innovative solutions to problems both anticipated and unexpected. At Ascent, we strive to approach each and every challenge with this mindset that promotes first of all empathy, then understanding, then innovation, and finally a “best-fit” solution.

What is Design Thinking?

Design thinking synthesizes analytical, divergent, and convergent thinking in the various stages of its workflow to finally arrive at the optimal solution.

The term “design thinking” can be traced back to 1987; however, the concept of design thinking has been around for much longer than that. The design thinking model stands as a counterpoint to the more traditional method of problem solving. 

What are the differences between these two schools of thought?

The “traditional” approach starts out with a clearly delineated problem. Then, a consensus solution to that problem is proposed. The bulk of the problem solving in such a methodology involves moving through a linear series of steps until the consensus solution is finally achieved, or revised according to its utility.

Design thinking, on the other hand, turns such a process on its head. Problem-solvers strive to examine a number of divergent solutions at the outset of the process, and then test such solutions to determine their “fit.” Design thinking synthesizes analytical, divergent, and convergent thinking in the various stages of its workflow to finally arrive at the optimal solution.

Customer-Obsession Creates Better Outcomes

Active listening makes it that much easier for our customers to buy into our solution. They become stakeholders from day one, which is a win for everyone involved.

Customer-obsession is one of our core values. Being a customer-centric company means that our approach to problem-solving reflects our keen interest in empathizing with our customers, understanding the root cause of their frustrations and pain points, and designing systems and services that specifically meet their unique needs.

The design thinking methodology provides the freedom we need to actively listen to our customers from the very start of the problem-solving process. It’s easy to sit behind a desk and say: “This is what you need.” But when designers go beyond just serving briefs and make it a point to hear out the customer with an open mind, then the end solution is almost inevitably superior to what may have been our original conception.

As an added benefit, our active listening makes it that much easier for our customers to buy into our solution. They become stakeholders from day one, which is a win for everyone involved.

How We Implement Design Thinking

Of course, as with any high-level concept, design thinking needs a framework of practical application to be useful in the real world. What we do at Ascent is utilize design sprints to help us meet customer needs – and design thinking is an integral part of such sprints.

Our design sprints are adapted from the popular Google Design Sprint methodology. Our process involves 5 key steps:

  • Conducting empathy interviews. We make it a point to be transparent and open with our interview subjects. We don’t always know the best-fit solution for their problems, which is why we probe, and dig, and explore their perspective. It’s vital that in this initial stage, we don’t try to interject our own values or perspectives into the conversation. This is all about them being heard; our role is to listen, clarify, and confirm.
  • Selecting a target focus. Once we’ve consolidated and analyzed all the data from our interviews, we determine what our design focal point should be. We come up with some preliminary sketches to serve as a rough outline of our objectives and potential solutions.
  • Prioritizing sketches. Next, we prioritize the sketches according to several criteria, such as how well the proposed solution would meet our objectives, its practicality, its functionality, and so on. 
  • Prototyping the experience. We then begin work on a prototype, or multiple prototypes, and look to stitch together the whole experience. We want to present the end-to-end experience that we hope our customers will enjoy upon the project’s completion.
  • Conducting usability sessions. Finally, we once more enlist the participation of our customers and stakeholders via usability sessions. We gather feedback from our customers, and begin iterations of the base design.

By implementing design thinking in such a way, we’ve been able to streamline our entire design process, involve our customers from start to finish, and provide the best possible solutions, instead of simply the most convenient.

Design Thinking in Action

Design is ultimately an expression of how humans can efficiently and effectively perform the job at hand. It’s not just a means to an end – it is an integral part of the final product.

Here’s an example of the value of design thinking in action here at Ascent:

We had been receiving feedback from our customers that they wanted an easy, intuitive way to navigate a specific feature. Because this aspect of our platform was not intuitive, customers were not finding the information they were looking for quickly enough, which actually led to them questioning the credibility of the product. Yikes! This is a classic example of the importance of empathy: while this issue may not have seemed so important from our end (because we know first-hand from building the product that the data is right), the customers didn’t have that level of transparency or product knowledge and therefore could only assume that an inability to find the information in the way they were accustomed to meant that was a problem with the information itself. 

We took measures to more fully understand the scope and nature of this problem. We initiated a two-and-a-half-week design sprint, and adhered to our 5-step design thinking process. We conducted interviews with a variety of customers and internal stakeholders. We took the resultant information, sketched, prioritized, and prototyped, and finally began usability testing. 

In the end, the results were overwhelmingly positive. Our customers were thrilled that we had not only listened to their concerns, but had taken proactive measures to overcome the challenges that they were facing. Even though this design sprint resulted in a fundamental paradigm shift in the way we processed rule updates, in the end our customers and stakeholders were completely satisfied, and we learned a lot from the whole experience.

Great Design is More than a Means to an End

At Ascent, design thinking is an integral part of what we do, and its principles of empathy, listening, and humanity are a reflection of who we are as a team. 

Design is ultimately an expression of how humans can efficiently and effectively perform the job at hand. It’s not just a means to an end – it is an integral part of the final product.

 

Interested in joining us? Check out our open roles below. 

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