What is horizon scanning?

As the pace of regulatory change increases, access to an effective horizon scanning tool is a must for all regulated financial services firms.

Compliance risks are innumerable, ranging from failure to properly implement regulations to events including money-laundering, insider trading and hacking scandals. In the digital economy, it’s imperative to keep ahead and anticipate risks before they materialise…this is where horizon scanning becomes a necessity.

Horizon scanning is the means of looking to the future to ascertain what challenges it might hold. In terms of RegTech, horizon scanning means looking ahead to anticipate the regulatory changes that might come into play, so that a firm is ready to implement such changes from the first day that they come into force.

The scale of change can differ; some changes are small and relatively easy to manage, other changes (MiFID II for example) touch every corner of business operations; requiring advanced and considered forward planning. Without continuous horizon scanning, and the ability to assess the impact of upcoming regulatory change on a firm, policies and procedures quickly become obsolete and non-compliant.

Anticipating, identifying, and understanding the impact of upcoming regulatory change (new regulations, legislation, guidance, and updates from around the world) is a critical capability for every financial services organization. Since 2008, the global financial services sector has seen more than 50,000 new rules and regulations come into force – equating to one new regulation every twelve minutes!

With this explosion of regulations, manual horizon scanning processes are proving ineffective as they require vast teams to trawl through countless data sources. It is for this reason that horizon scanning operations have turned to technology – as the task can be carried out almost instantaneously with the right technology.

For example, CUBE’s Digital Regulation Platform transforms the ability to track and monitor regulatory change and then link it to compliance obligations. The platform leverages artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, and other transformational technologies to fully-automate financial services horizon scanning. It will:

• Track and capture all upcoming financial services regulation – across 180 countries in 60 languages;
• Connect upcoming regulatory statement content to existing controls, identifying those affected and requiring remediation;
• Provide instantaneous insights into gaps between upcoming regulatory obligations and existing controls and policies;
• Provide a holistic view of enterprise-wide compliance risks posed by upcoming regulation and legislation;
• Alert business owners when upcoming regulations expose compliance gaps; and
• Quickly determine their impact across your organization.