How Technology is Shaping Trends in Compliance

By Bureau Van Dijk

Compliance teams play a vital role in corporate due diligence, and technology can make them more efficient and cost-effective. This is increasingly important as regulatory pressures have an impact on the operational outcomes of KYC and other compliance processes.

We followed up our 2017 webinar "Channelling big data through RegTech—now is the time to future proof your due diligence programme" by interviewing participants Keith Furst of Data Derivatives and Bill Hauserman of Bureau van Dijk, a Moody's Analytics company for a short video. Here are the trends they identified and predictions for ways technology will shape due diligence:

"The human analyst needs to be more strategic; they're going to be making more intellectual decisions rather than actually clicking a button," said Furst. "You have more data come in, robotic process automation, and then you actually have a decision from a compliance analyst that gets fed back in to the AI so it could learn and make better predictions for compliance about where the risk is."

"It's more about using smarter, the technology and the data, data being paramount, to make the people more effective," said Hauserman. "That in and of itself will drive down cost."

Better, faster decisions

Hauserman notes that 85% of most KYC processes—which cost businesses $12 billion in 2016, are done by people rather than data and technology. Unstructured data adds to the costs and time required to manually process data. But as Furst explains, compliance specialists can use structured data, along with AI and machine learning, to identify compliance-relevant data to help with their risk assessments and decision-making.

"What the artificial intelligence, machine learning can't do is make the proper decisions," says Hauserman. "Only humans can do that. That's going to require the change at the compliance professional level, where instead of gathering information and assessing risk, they're going to have to determine risk from a vast amount of information that they actually never had before. So that process, to me, is the complex one."

To learn more about how technology can shape the ways companies conduct due diligence and other compliance processes, watch the full video featuring Hauserman and Furst, moderated by Lynn Olsen, senior director, global marketing and events, Bureau van Dijk.

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