Regulatory monitoring has emerged as the single greatest pain point in compliance operations, according to Ascent RegTech’s 2026 RegTech Benchmark Survey.
According to AscentAI, when risk and compliance professionals across regional banks, investment banks, and broker-dealer firms were asked to rank the five most difficult elements of their regulatory change management processes, monitoring consistently came out on top — a finding that signals a structural problem rather than a temporary workload issue.
AscentAI recently discussed a key question within RegTech, which is whether monitoring is the regulatory blind spot of firms.
The challenge was felt most acutely in the Asia-Pacific region, where respondents identified monitoring regulators as the most difficult element across the entire change management lifecycle.
The reasons behind this are well understood, if difficult to solve. Thousands of regulators operating across dozens of jurisdictions routinely issue updates on overlapping timescales, creating a volume of regulatory content that can quickly overwhelm already stretched compliance teams. The sheer quantity of output means that relevant updates risk being buried beneath a tide of noise — and with most organisations operating under resource constraints, the margin for error is slim. Even when a pertinent change is identified, teams still face the challenge of connecting it to the specific obligations it affects and the downstream actions it should trigger. Manual processes compound each of these problems, with search tools and email subscriptions offering only partial coverage and rarely linking a regulatory development to the concrete steps required for compliance.
Addressing these limitations requires a more systematic approach. Advanced horizon scanning tools are increasingly positioned as the foundation on which effective regulatory change management is built. At their most capable, these platforms provide continuous monitoring across global regulatory sources, automated daily alerts on relevant rule changes, and intelligent filtering that ensures only pertinent content reaches the right people. Critically, they also link related regulatory content to give compliance teams a fuller picture, whilst providing workflow tools, templates, and built-in audit trails that support efficient task management.
Making the transition to continuous compliance monitoring effectively hinges on four capabilities working in concert: monitoring every relevant source on a continuous basis; automatically capturing and aggregating updates into a single, business-specific source of truth; applying intelligent filters so that only relevant changes surface to the right stakeholders; and linking those updates directly to existing obligations and downstream change management processes. Organisations that successfully bring all four elements together stand to transform regulatory monitoring from a chronic operational burden into a manageable, systematised function — and reduce the risk of compliance gaps that manual processes routinely leave behind.
Read the full AscentAI post here.
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