‘In the room where it happened’ – RegTech NZ reflects on the FinTech Hui

It was an absolute pleasure to be part of the amazing FinTech Hui to share our RegTech NZ journey and to promote this important area of growing technology innovation.

RegTech has similar goals as FinTech to automate processes, make consistent informed decisions, deliver streamlined customer service but most importantly ensure compliance in a strategic manner with access to enhanced reporting, analytics and audit capability.

To progress on this journey we need to collaborate, and our event gave our strategic partners EDT, Middleware, Mosaic, and AWS along with AWS partners HNRY, Graphic Research Labs and Newton Russell, the opportunity to share their experiences at our panel and roundtable discussion.Our journey and vision has been nicely summed up in this short article by Phil Doak, Partner, Mosaic FSI

Acknowledging the current reality provided a starting point for considering our panel discussion topic “how to promote adoption of Regtech to drive innovation”. We have several entities in New Zealand responsible for developing legislation and its supporting regulations and/or enforcing them. We have differences in approach, from regulations that are quite prescriptive (in the prudential supervisory area for example), to those that are principles and outcomes based (in the area of conduct for example). And, the industry has already faced a huge amount of regulatory change over recent years, incurring very significant implementation costs.

It is clear that there are opportunities to leverage technology to improve our approach to regulatory development and its associated implementation response: by increasing the level of collaboration (with a greater participation from the voice of technology ) between those developing the law and those who have to implement it, this applies to both new legislation and identifying opportunities to optimize and improve the operational efficiency, effectiveness and adaptability of the regulations we already have in place; by developing a greater awareness across the sector of Regtech solutions more broadly and how they may assist industry participants; and, from a regulated firm perspective, by leveraging the investment already made, or being made, in responding to regulatory requirements to drive technology-enabled process change and data enrichment that will help generate new insights and support innovative responses relating to customers, the services they use and business process more broadly.

Whether it’s “Regtech” enabled by an intelligently sourced, effectively implemented vendor solution, or it’s existing technology that is thoughtfully leveraged to facilitate a smart, effective response to a regulatory challenge, technology (and data in particular) can and will play a critical role in supporting innovation and change from the perspective of the regulators, supervisors, and the organizations under their oversight.

If you want to be part of what we are building at RegTechNZ please reach out to us via our linked in page here, or our Fintech WG page here where you can keep up with what is going on in RegTech and what events we have coming up.