Finding the right regulatory change management solution has become increasingly challenging in today’s crowded RegTech market.
Many vendors promise to automate complex compliance workflows with AI, yet some deliver little more than manual labour behind the scenes. This discrepancy has left financial institutions questioning whether the technology truly lives up to its claims, claims AscentAI.
A major U.S. bank recently revealed its disappointment after learning that its vendor’s supposed AI-driven automation relied heavily on people manually processing regulatory documents. The experience highlighted a growing concern: many so-called AI-powered tools fail to deliver genuine automation, forcing clients to continue handling regulatory data manually.
Much of the industry’s problem lies in its dependence on repurposed horizon scanning tools. These systems track updates to regulatory documents but stop short of interpreting or operationalising the content. While they alert customers to new or amended rules, they leave the hard work—such as extracting obligations and determining relevance—to compliance teams. As a result, organisations face the same burdensome manual tasks despite investing in expensive automation solutions.
AscentAI takes a fundamentally different approach. The company believes that real regulatory change management requires identifying and operationalising the specific obligations embedded within regulatory text. Its platform automatically extracts and versions obligations as data objects, identifies relevance to the client’s business, and even provides side-by-side comparisons of updated rules. This approach enables firms to maintain a complete, defensible audit trail and significantly reduces time spent on manual reviews.
According to BJ Sanford, a U.S.-based regulatory lawyer who previously led IBM’s regulatory obligation data practice, “AscentAI [is] the only product in this category that approached managing [regulatory] data the way we [as subject matter experts] thought about it.” Sanford explained that most vendors focus only on horizon scanning, which classifies regulatory updates but fails to make them actionable or context-specific.
At the heart of AscentAI’s platform lies an obligation-based data strategy rather than a document-based one. This means that during onboarding, the system maps a company’s business operations and obligations against relevant regulations, building a comprehensive obligations register. When new rules appear, AscentAI’s AI engine automatically determines their applicability, eliminating the need for compliance teams to read and analyse each update manually.
In contrast, competitors that rely on document-based models treat every regulatory update as an isolated event. This forces organisations to repeatedly reassess the same information, wasting time and money. AscentAI’s methodology ensures that updates are integrated directly into an enterprise-wide “source of regulatory truth,” enabling faster, more accurate decision-making.
Sanford added, “Once you have the regulatory obligations problem solved, then providing a valuable regulatory change management feed and regulatory tracking is much easier, and it becomes much more valuable to the customer.” His remarks underline a crucial point: automation must begin with understanding the obligations, not just identifying the documents.
Before investing in any regulatory intelligence solution, compliance leaders are urged to probe deeper into a vendor’s capabilities. Key questions include whether the system helps define a regulatory map and obligations inventory, whether it automates obligation extraction and applicability assessments, and whether it delivers change summaries and alerts for impacted policies and controls.
Regulatory change management cannot be achieved through half measures. True automation requires complete lifecycle coverage—from monitoring regulators and identifying new rules to analysing obligations and updating governance frameworks. Buyers must separate marketing hype from proven capability to ensure their investment delivers on its promise.
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