Significant changes have occurred in the risk landscape in recent years, increasing the regulatory compliance demands placed on financial services organisations and driving the need for enhanced risk management approaches. Firms are facing regulatory, shareholder and public pressure to further enhance governance systems, while increasing transparency, competitiveness and profitability. As a result, financial services firms and regulators alike are revising their expectations how risk is identified and mitigated.

At the same time, there have been significant technological advances in big data, analytics, and cognitive computing, which can generate much deeper insights, faster than ever before. However, organizations have not yet been able to effectively apply all of these capabilities into one solution.

Deloitte and IBM are developing solutions for financial services firms to more efficiently address their immediate compliance and conduct requirements. One of these is a regulatory compliance and control solution, which is being demonstrated at the IBM Vision conference in Florida this week. It combines Deloitte’s regulatory intelligence with advanced technology from IBM. It will leverage IBM Analytics and cloud capabilities, with plans to incorporate Watson cognitive computing to disaggregate and classify regulations, paragraph by paragraph, helping clients to compare their control framework in direct relation to current and emerging regulatory mandates. It can help to provide a streamlined view across the business, helping to confirm regulatory control coverage, manage remediation and prioritize the efforts of future regulatory change programs.

Deloitte and IBM have also started to develop the next generation of capabilities for managing risk and regulatory compliance. Moving beyond the use of traditional structured data to leverage unstructured information and external data, the solution will include more predictive capabilities. This can be applied in real-time to help deliver actionable insights, limit exposure and reduce the impact of compliance and conduct issues that arise.

“The global enterprise risk management domain is undergoing significant transformation, and emerging technologies like big data and predictive analytics can be used to address complex regulatory requirements,” said Tom Scampion, Global Risk Analytics leader at Deloitte UK. “We are excited to be working with IBM to apply their market leading technologies and platforms to enable faster, more insightful business decisions. This alliance aims to completely re-frame and re-shape the risk space.”

“Financial services firms are under tremendous pressure, which has forced them to spend the majority of their IT budgets addressing regulatory requirements. There is an opportunity to transform the approach organizations are taking and leverage the same investments to go beyond compliance and deliver real business value,” said Alistair Rennie, GM of Analytics Solutions, IBM. “We are excited to be working with Deloitte, the leading global risk consultancy provider, with a reputation of helping its clients proactively manage enterprise risk. Combining their knowledge with our technology will provide our clients with breakthrough capabilities and deliver risk and regulatory intelligence in ways previously not possible.”