Kaizen’s Single Rulebook has won the award for Best Solution for Regulatory Change Management in A-Team Group’s RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2024. The London-based company’s product impressed judges with its ability to streamline compliance workflows.
The RegTech Insight Awards recognise established providers and innovative newcomers that offer solutions that are successfully improving firms’ ability to respond effectively to evolving and ever more complex regulatory requirements across the global financial services industry. Winners are selected by A-Team Group’s independent, expert advisory board in collaboration with its editorial team.
Chris Dingley, chief executive of Single Rulebook, spoke to RegTech Insight about the importance of winning this award and explained why and how Single Rulebook was developed and outlined the benefits it can deliver.
A-Team: What does winning A-Team Group’s 2024 RegTech Insight Europe award for Best Solution for Regulatory Change Management mean to Kaizen?
Chris: We are delighted. It’s recognition for all the hard work and effort that our team has made over the last year to develop the platform further and it also recognises the unique Law Compare solution that we have developed with Linklaters, which makes it easier for firms to manage not only regulatory change but also differences in regulation across jurisdictions.
A-Team: What types of capital markets clients does Single Rulebook work with?
Chris: Single Rulebook is a software solution that enables clients to search, share and manage regulatory rules on one digital platform. It was established with the aim of making regulation manageable and easy.
Through powerful and dynamic rule maps, Single Rulebook’s user interface promotes collaboration, and information sharing.
It is especially helpful to banks, asset management companies and law firms – enabling them to work more efficiently with changes and updated to financial regulation. More than just a search tool, the platform also integrates with a client’s own systems and delivers an audit trail of regulatory change and decision making, saving time and cost.
A-Team: What challenges are these clients facing?
Chris: There are three main challenges:
- Ever-changing and new regulations: Global regulation is continually evolving. Not only are new rules introduced but existing rules are continually tweaked and updated. It can be time consuming trying to locate a specific piece of regulation and ensuring it’s the most recent version.
- Sharing and collaborating effectively on regulation: Legal interpretations of regulatory rules need to be kept up to date, shared and communicated across large organisations which can become unmanageable and a company’s view of regulation can change over time.
- Keeping an audit trail of regulatory interpretations and implementation: Firms must demonstrate compliance with each applicable rule and their pathway to regulatory compliance. Some leeway is provided in the initial period after a new piece of regulation is introduced, however regulators’ expectations become more stringent over time and it’s important to be able to demonstrate immediate compliance to auditors and regulators. Spreadsheets and email chains are not effective tools for showcasing a firm’s regulatory interpretations and the implementation of rules. It’s important to demonstrate operational change and regulatory compliance efficiently and Single Rulebook can do this digitally and in real-time.
A-Team: How does Kaizen help customers address these challenges?
Chris: Single Rulebook provides one digital source for regulatory research, making life much easier for legal and compliance teams, with employees able to retrieve regulatory text and rules quickly and efficiently.
Single Rulebook uses natural-language processing to improve many workflows and processes so that regulatory opinion and interpretations can be shared and accessed digitally on one common platform. It provides the functionality to annotate regulation so that the company’s approved stance can be accessed by all team members.
In 2023, we developed Law Compare in conjunction with Linklaters to support their in-house teams and provide their clients with quick and easy access to regulatory comparisons and guidance on the differences and changes brought about by diverging EU and UK MiFID II regimes.
The online Law Compare tool provides a single authoritative source of the most up-to-date regulation and guidance, and offers full coverage of EU and UK MiFID II regimes, from Directives, Regulations, Regulatory Technical Standards to Level 3 guidance, with the potential to extend to other areas of regulation. The legislation hosted on the Single Rulebook platform is complemented by Linklaters’ guidance which provides an invaluable record of the firm’s legal views, interpretation and comments relating to specific provisions and areas of EU-UK divergence.
A-Team: How will you develop the solution over the next year?
Chris: The year ahead will see further regulatory change across many global regulations, particularly in the UK and Europe, with the EMIR Refit and upcoming amendments to MiFID II.
It’s essential that firms can not only keep abreast of these changes but also compare versions. We’re looking forward to continuing to help our clients manage regulation and make it easier for them to navigate the changes ahead. We also have lots of exciting developments and new projects in the pipeline for Single Rulebook, which we will be sharing over the course of the coming months.
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