Donato Varani, Managing Partner at RbyC – a multidisciplinary provider offering services in the regulatory field with a RegTech approach -, explains why AI is an essential resource for optimizing compliance in the banking sector, and not only
Regulatory environment and financial compliance: the state of the art
In highly regulated sectors, monitoring regulatory news and analysing the impacts they may have on organisational and business structures is an inefficient and time-consuming process.
The same can be said about the process needed to identify risks and share data and compliance reports, which is currently inefficient and very complex.
A complexity that is well known to Donato Varani – now Managing Partner at RbyC – has been working in the financial regulatory sector for over 30 years, including 15 years spent at the Bank of Italy in the field of banking and financial supervision.
In addition, Varani – interviewed during the event organized by Aptus.AI at the end of 2024 – has also worked for years in the field of inspections of supervised intermediaries.
“The regulatory environment has become increasingly complicated, especially in the European context, where we are witnessing a strong push for regulation” – explains Varani, who now advises on behalf of banks and other supervised entities, both Italian and foreign.
In particular, RbyC offers services to financial intermediaries in the field of compliance and internal control systems, being a company that is heavily impacted by all activities related to regulatory compliance in the financial sector.
“Today there is a high complexity in the regulatory environment” – says Varani – “also due to the financial innovation itself, which leads authorities to issue more and more detailed rules, generating a situation that creates difficulties for financial intermediaries in managing regulations”.
How to exploit AI to manage the regulatory complexity more efficiently
Fortunately, however, technology – and AI in particular – can become a valuable ally in finding an answer to this regulatory complexity.
“This complexity is now entirely entrusted to people with expertise in the regulatory field” – explains Varani – “and Artificial Intelligence is certainly a very useful tool that can help them manage more efficiently the entire regulatory complex”.
“AI can be used to help these experts – whose supervision remains essential – manage regulatory complexity more efficiently” – concludes Varani, then adding. “And in RbyC we have already decided to apply Artificial Intelligence to digitalize the management of some areas, such as compliance and anti-money laundering”.
AI is not only an ally for the supervised companies, but also a tool that can become beneficial for regulators.
“Artificial Intelligence can be used also by the issuing bodies since it allows, if properly used, to have norms that are alive, evolving with the technological environment” – explains Varani.
And this is why at Aptus.AI we have been working for some time also with the EU banking authorities and public administration, which can surely benefit from our proprietary machine-readable format of legal texts.
Aptus’s features bring AI in the compliance sector
Turning back to the field of compliance, organizations in highly regulated sectors can no longer wait to find technological solutions that will allow them to manage the ever increasing regulatory complexity.
This is exactly the context in which Aptus.AI’s RegTech solution intervenes to optimize financial compliance processes.
Aptus responds to the needs of compliance experts, thanks to functionalities designed for regulatory monitoring, consultation and analysis.
But how does Aptus actually help to optimize compliance processes in the financial sector?
The Generative AI-based assistant integrated in Aptus makes the consultation of legal texts even more intuitive, fast and efficient, thanks to a “LegalGPT” to be used to ask questions about regulations in natural language.
This service exploits the legal requirements objectively translated into digital format and follows the official hierarchy of regulations, representing the first reliable and hallucination-free solution for the legal sector.
Aptus’ GenerativeAI-based assistant offers instant rule summaries, support in identifying relevant parts of text for a specific research and help in creating drafts of internal processes and procedures.
Using Aptus, compliance experts are able to prepare in advance for the entry into force of new regulations, having the possibility to navigate, compare and analyse the regulatory texts even at the stages preceding the official publication.
Besides, in order to allow compliance professionals to always be updated on regulatory news, Aptus sends – automatically and in real-time – personalized email notifications on updates related to the regulatory areas of interest.
Finally, the platform also includes advanced internal and external searches on the regulatory texts of interest, so that the obligations introduced, the possible sanctions and all the relevant information for regulatory compliance experts can be identified immediately.
