What is RegTech and Regulatory Monitoring?

The world of regtech is expanding fast, so here’s a quick rundown of what’s what, to help you navigate your way through the different services and innovative tools available.

1. What is regtech?

Regtech is the combination of regulation and technology tools developed to help organisations manage and facilitate compliance in a more efficient manner.

While the term and idea of regtech has taken a little longer to catch than its sister term ‘legaltech’, investment has ramped up and the industry has begun maturing.

It’s common to see regtech mentioned specifically for the financial industry, however, regtech isn’t just applicable to financial institutions and services. Every sector has its own rules and regulations to monitor and comply with. 

2. The regtech landscape

Regtech has been profiled by top research firms like Forrester, Gartner, CB Insights as it’s grown over time. The regtech landscape is now vast, so here are 3 main categories to help you find your way around. 

1. Regulatory Monitoring 

Tools that track and update the raw legal content (the legislation, rules and regulations) published from its source, e.g. regulators or governments. These regtech solutions normally configure this data as a content library, regulatory feed or display this information in a resource center to make it easy to see your legal requirements.  

2. Regulatory Requirements

Solutions that go a step further than compiling and tracking raw legal content. These regtech tools provide the user with knowledge about the regulation in relation to their organisation, as well as the means to action it. For instance, filtering a specific section of law, a highlight of the requirement or the consequences that come with non-compliance.  

3. Compliance Management

The final regtech piece to the puzzle is compliance. Technologies that incorporate workflows and compliance related information specific to your business activities. These platforms enable users to track or assess their current compliance and manage their steps towards achieving compliance. 

Citation Compliance is actually a regtech tool built to address all 3 of these areas above, but for now we’ll focus more on the regulatory monitoring aspect below.

3.The power of regulatory monitoring technology

The pace of regulatory change is increasing across all legal categories (financial, employment, health & safety, environmental, data security etc.) and keeping up with these changes is time-consuming, even for legal and compliance professionals. The moment you begin to multiply this effort across different operational sites, jurisdictions and languages - it quickly becomes a mammoth task to manage and know your specific legal obligations. 

Citation Compliance’s partner, Libryo, saw this first-hand during the Coronavirus pandemic. They launched a COVID-19 Regulation Tracker to follow the thousands of legal updates on dozens of sources in relation to Coronavirus. Across 18 countries and 9 months, they tracked hundreds of regulations related just to Covid legislation. According to Enhesa’s 2021 EHS regulations watch, there were 96,192 global regulatory developments since Jan 2020, of which 57,703 originated in North America.   

Regulatory monitoring tools help businesses overcome these challenges by: 

• Providing efficiency gains

• Minimising organisational risk 

• Preventing human error

• Making it easy to cross-compare the law across multiple jurisdictions

• Being better prepared for audits 

• Facilitating good team alignment and collaboration

Learn more about Citation Manage™, an affordable regulatory monitoring platform for compliance professionals.