Regulation Technology is being adopted to address regulatory compliance issues for financial services on an international level.
RegTech is transforming financial services regulation. As new technology evolves, new regulations will arise to promote safe and responsible application of these technologies.
It’s not surprising that compliance is being automated. Financial firms are handling more regulation than ever before. The volume of documentation and the speed required to process this is increasing faster than people can keep up. RegTech is a tool for enhancing human surveillance and enabling speedy compliance for financial services.
Political global changes mean regulations change fast. This results in new sets of regulations published in different languages that international financial service entities must also consider. The complexity of cross-border compliance continues to grow.
Combining RegTech and multiple languages for cross-border regulatory compliance models is not as easy as putting documents through a machine translation engine. Firstly, the accuracy of machine translation lies between approximately 38% to 70% at present. This is dependent upon the language pairs involved and the domain or sector specific terminology. Machine translation results for financial terminology still rank low on accuracy.
Poor results for financial translations using AI & MT arise partly because many financial terms and products simply exist only in one language. Sometimes, there is no equivalent word for a financial product in another language because the product is not offered in that market (for example SIPPs and ISAs). Also financial regulation is changing faster than ever before, and to address regulatory guidelines, new names and descriptions of products and processes appear. Professional translators are needed to define and describe these products in different languages.
Human translators, highly skilled professionals with financial knowledge in both languages are where we come in. Aplomb has 33 years of providing bespoke solutions for projects where technical translation is only part of the outcome. RegTech is one area where Aplomb’s linguistic support excels. Aplomb worked with a leading RegTech company to create flexible solutions to enhance automated cross-border RegTech processes. Only professional human linguists with specialist financial knowledge in both languages could adapt the technology and then select the correct outputs for translation and inclusion in the next step of the process. For complex processes with automated technology requiring multi-lingual outputs, human linguists are necessary to creatively apply multiple skills to a task, assisted by technology that they program to run.
Aplomb’s team of professional linguists with financial and technological expertise produced the required outcomes in 14 languages necessary for the delivery of a much wider project. Our key to success at Aplomb is our expertise in assigning the best skilled linguists to each project. On the other hand, we are always interested in using technology to assist us in a secure manner.
Understanding the accuracy of automated outputs is key to improved performance. When implementation of innovative AI solutions is adopted for both machine translation and RegTech, it is important to understand the level of inaccuracy involved as we work towards successful automation. The optimisation engine that will “learn” to replicate the assessment process of a human analyst and then propose a suitable response is still wearing training wheels. This however, is no hindrance to using RegTech now. New regulations monitoring the employment of RegTech for financial services are sure to emerge, and meanwhile, just as with machine translation, we must ensure humans are still monitoring outcomes.
