In collaboration with the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Bank of England (BoE), which together comprise two of the most important financial regulators in the world, Immuta provided strategic input and expertise on how to embed regulations within software - bringing financial regulations into the machine age. Immuta chief privacy officer and head of legal engineering, Andrew Burt serves as the U.S. adviser for this global effort.

Drawing from lessons learned in building its own data management platform to enforce any regulatory regime on the planet, the company today unveiled its findings for the FCA and BoE in a new research paper, “2017 Model Driven and Machine Executable Regulations.”

According to reports, the cost of regulatory compliance is estimated to be around $80 billion globally and could reach $120 billion in the next five years. In the U.S. alone, financial institutions have spent more than $160 billion in fines for non-compliance. As international regulations such as GDPR go into effect, these costs could skyrocket. The ability to link regulations, compliance and standards with an organization’s applications and databases could fundamentally change how the financial industry understands, interprets and reports regulatory information.

“AI and machine learning have transformed how financial institutions do business, enabling them to harness their data for faster decision making. Regulations and compliance enforcement needs to keep pace with the speed of innovation in order to be effective,” said Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer and legal engineer, Immuta. “Through this collaboration, a future in which regulations are directly embedded into software is possible. Regulatory changes could be implemented with immediacy, while financial institutions could demonstrate compliance faster and more cost-efficiently - easing the compliance burden on regulators and financial services organizations alike.”

The FCA, BoE and Immuta are tackling this problem to explore how future regulations can be embedded directly into algorithms to dramatically change the way financial regulations are written, enforced and reviewed. The FCA and BoE recently concluded a two-week TechSprint to create an initial structure of marked-up regulation in a machine readable format - developing an initial working prototype, along with an assessment of the open source and long-term potential of the project.

At the conclusion of the TechSprint, Christopher Woolard, the executive director of strategy and competition for the FCA, stated, “A huge amount of cost is sunk into regulatory compliance. There are real costs in terms of time, management effort, and distraction that go around these systems at the moment. If they can be channeled elsewhere, channeled to the issues that create public value, and really go to the heart of why we regulate in the first place, then that’s a huge prize on the table.”