In our new report, Regulatory Technology for the 21st Century, with the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Agile Governance, we define RegTech as the “application of various new technological solutions that assist highly regulated industry stakeholders, including regulators, in setting, effectuating and meeting regulatory governance, reporting, compliance, and risk management obligation.”

See:  RegTech: Powering the future of regulation

RegTech can help both the regulator and the highly regulated to minimize risk, improve outcomes, and lower costs. It helps connect “the dots” more quickly and automates tasks. It can also translate complex regulation into code. Applying technologies, like AI, blockchain, and cloud, responsibly to augment the ability of compliance teams can help both the regulated and regulator to do their job more effectively and collaboratively.

For the regulated, it strengthens compliance while enabling agility to anticipate and dynamically respond to changing regulatory needs. For the regulator, it enables more transparency as well as agility in modifying requirements to meet new risks more timely. The nature of the relationship changes from “set-and-forget” to iterative and user-centred regulation design.

Embrace new engagement models

First and foremost, regulators must be aware of and embrace new engagement models to power more innovative and agile regulatory processes and outcomes. This means a reinvention of how the private and public sectors engage around regulatory matters, evolving from a producer/consumer dynamic to one grounded in partnership, co-learning and multi-stakeholder consideration - similar to Suade Labs’ support from the EU and successful collaboration with the UK government.