Many organisations continue to manage regulatory change through a patchwork of spreadsheets, ageing legacy systems and bolted-on third-party integrations. That fragmentation, rather than the volume of new rules, is the true source of risk running through the change management process.
According to AscentAI, disjointed systems remain manual by nature, whatever vendors may claim about automating individual actions.
AscentAI recently jumped into a discussion on why regulatory change is an orchestration problem, and not a monitoring problem.
Spreadsheets cannot talk to legacy platforms or third-party tools, meaning someone must manually shuttle information between them. The question of who owns that responsibility often goes unanswered, with duties scattered across departments and compliance areas.
The consequences are drawing regulatory scrutiny. Wolters Kluwer said, “… despite significant investment in compliance infrastructure, many banks still struggle to operationalize regulatory change effectively. The result is a persistent gap between awareness of regulatory updates and execution of compliant action—a gap that increasingly draws the attention of examiners.”
Modern monitoring tools are effective at catching regulatory changes, and horizon scanning is widely regarded as the lowest hanging fruit. The real difficulty lies in orchestrating what follows: identifying specific obligations under a new or updated rule, informing the right individuals, determining the business impact, and instituting the policy and process changes needed to stay compliant.
Forbes has described process orchestration as establishing a consistent structure for how work progresses from start to finish, applying logic across a complete process rather than relying on individual systems or teams. Simply identifying a rule change is barely a beginning; genuine change management stretches across the full lifecycle, from detection through to completed policy and procedure updates, whether inside a GRC platform or not.
Point solutions that address only one stage of that lifecycle risk locking firms into silos. A tool may flag a rule change and route it to an individual, but translating that change into concrete business actions typically remains manual. Workflows should not grind to a halt waiting for people to act; they should prompt the right actions at the right time.
Forbes said, “Even when systems are connected, there is often no shared logic governing how work progresses across departments. When systems don’t coordinate the work, people need to—and that doesn’t scale. To address this gap, more organizations focus on how work moves across their operations, not just how data moves.”
Automation platforms with built-in workflows allow firms to standardise regulatory change management enterprise-wide. Capabilities include real-time monitoring that parses documents into obligations, automated identification of relevant changes through side-by-side rule comparisons, GRC integration that notifies policy and control owners of downstream impacts, and audit trails logging every change for defensible proof during exams.
AscentAI positions the workflows in its Regulatory Change Management Platform as completing this picture, helping organisations orchestrate and operationalise regulatory changes consistently, efficiently and on time.
Read the full AscentAI post here.
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