Regulatory Trends: A Look Back and into 2024

SPEAKERS

Asif Alam, Donna Bales, and Phil Cox 
(Moderator) Ronjini Joshua

Introduction  

Ronjini Joshua <Moderator>

Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining us. I’m going to just wait a couple of minutes. We have a lot of registrants today. So, I’ll wait for them to file in. We’ll start in just a couple of minutes and get going.

<pause>

Moderator

I always forget to bring the lounge music. We should do that next time. Yeah. Thanks for your patience, everybody.

<pause>

All right, we will get started. Thank you for joining us today, we are looking at Regulatory Trends: a look back into 2024 (and beyond, of course.)  We have a few housekeeping items before we get started. If you have any questions during the webinar, please feel free to drop them in the Q&A section. (There’s a Q&A chat box.) Our panelists will answer them at some point during the session (if it’s highly relevant) or we’ll hold it till the end. So don’t worry, we will address your questions during the meeting. If we don’t get to it, we’ll email you with the answer. This will be on demand. So, we are recording, and this will be available on demand and emailed out to all the registrants after the webinar. If you have any other concerns, feel free to chat with me: I’m at Compliance AI. (It’ll either go to Sheila or myself). If you have any issues with sound or anything like that, you could chat with me directly as well. So, with that, I’m going to hand it over excuse me to Asif Alam, our CEO of Compliance AI to get us started with our esteemed advisors and guests today.

Asif Alam <Asif> 

Thanks a lot, Ronjini. Happy Holidays everybody. It’s so great to be here as we are closing 2023. What a year 2023 is. Donna, Phil and I are looking forward to having a great conversation here. But before I do that, I want to very quickly introduce our two distinguished advisors who are with us today, Donna Bales is a seasoned practitioner with 20-plus years in financial markets. She has been our advisor for some time, and she has been amazing. She has some great insights. She will give you a very good insightful perspective on Canada also. I’m looking forward Donna, to the conversation. We also have Phil Cox. Phil has joined us as an advisor recently. So, I’m looking forward to having a very interesting discussion with you, Phil. Phil has an amazing career (as you can see here) with the RBS/NatWest group and more recently with Silicon Valley Bank. He has done pretty much everything from technology to information security, and global operations. He’s very well-versed in third-party risk management and all that stuff. So, this will be very interesting. We are looking forward to a lot of the questions that hopefully you guys will ask. Just to tee it up, what we will be focused on is number one, (which is in the minds of everyone), how did 2023 fare, and the impact of regulations? What do organizations need to monitor as “hot button” issues in today’s shifting financial landscape? We saw that (trust me), in the first quarter, we saw that this year. Last but not least, is your organization prepared for 2024, and what’s ahead? What are you doing around those things? So, with that Ronjini, if you don’t mind, we’ll do a quick poll, right here. What’s the hot button challenge you see emerging in 2024? (I cannot vote. I have a very strong opinion here), but I hope everybody else does.

Poll #1

What hot-button challenges do you see emerging in 2024?

1. Operational Resilience
2. Using AI and data oversight in compliance and risk.
3. Transparency and disclosure

<Moderator>

We’ll give you guys about a minute to answer (so that we can get the right results).

Asif 

Yeah, so keep the poll open. But with that, I would just start off looking back at the year, the new cost of compliance and everything. So. Phil, do you want to or Donna?

Phil Cox <Phil>

Yes, I’m happy to pick this one up Asif and it’s good to be connected to everybody on here. Obviously 2023 has been quite a turbulent year and it’s really shifted focus on to regional banks that were already under pressure (in relation to their strategy, if you like.) The deposit gathering, and the pressures on the focus with FDIC insurance and those types of things, as well as lending (and banks’ appetite to lend), the emergence of the private markets and the credit funds that have that have emerged and the different FinTechs taking small pieces of mortgages and other credit products. So, it’s already been a tough time. As rates have risen, so have margins been squeezed, because depositors have been much more focused on the safety of their money, and also the returns that they’re getting. More and more expectations on financial institutions (from a regulatory compliance perspective), which brings its own pressures and costs, making the focus on compliance and regulatory matters a huge priority. So definitely a challenging year, which is going to set the tone, I think, for 2024 and 2025. 

Asif

Donna, do want to add anything?

Donna Bales <Donna>

Yeah, sure. I think the other big thing we can’t ignore is the end of 2022 when generative AI drops. With that net black last year, (for 2023), it’s been a year where we’re just trying to understand it. The regulators are trying to figure out how they might update or revise existing regulations that maybe applied to oversight and new vertical regulations, (like the EU act, Executive Order, etc.,) have come to fruition. So, a lot of fluidity there in terms of regulation, at a time also, when this generative AI has the potential to significantly improve productivity, right? So, people are really eager to use it and get their hands on it. But at the same time, there’s this push-pull between innovation and regulation. So, a really interesting year in terms of that. Lots of talk around this push-pull between innovation and regulation. Also, I think, tagging on to what Phil said, that this enhanced focus on risk management can’t be ignored, right? At every institution, there’s much more rigor there, based on the activities and issues with the regional banks early last year.

Asif

Yeah, exactly. And the poll says, (the poll we just did) says so. So, to that, a lot of folks are talking about Gen AI, and how that has impacted the whole year. It’s just not compliance, it’s everything but even in compliance. I very vividly remember starting the year 2023 and then how in the middle of Q1, where all the banks, (the regional banks) went through this very turmoiled time, if you will, in the banking industry, combined with the interest rate pressure. So, there was a lot of stuff happening within the regional bank. Then on top of that, you had Gen AI, this technology thing all over. How do you use it? What do you want to do? One thing I remember, if I look back on Q1 on into Q2 of this year is that a lot of our customers were initially asking about Gen AI, but then also making sure how we are using it. What are we doing? Hopefully, you’re not using “open AI” and all that. So, there was a lot of talk about the whole Gen AI. I think within this year, what has happened is that, with all those discussions and all the things happening in q1 and q2. I won’t say that it has matured completely, but in the discussion, people are more aware of what it can do and what we should not be doing with it. Again, within the compliance area, it’s the same: creating boundaries and that “fine line” of what can it be used for and what to pass on it for now, in that sense. So that takes us to, (and I think this is an important area also) we’ll go back to open AI. We’re still talking about it. Donna, do you want to talk a little bit about the experimentation and other things in here?

Donna

Yeah, sure. Because, you know, we’re in this community here. We’re all in financial services and the reality is, in financial services, large language models have been used for some time, right? Like, if you look at a financial crime solution, (a surveillance solution), more than likely, they use large language models, right? What’s happened with generative AI is that it has become accessible to a wider group of individuals within every organization. It’s been a really interesting year because we did a lot, (the Canadian Reg Tech Association) did a lot with the community in 2022. On AI governance, we thought we were in really good shape, we thought we tackled it, and then generative AI drops. Then the NIST risk framework drops. And it kind of changes the dynamics and it made you have to relook at governance and risk. So, it’s been an interesting time. I totally agree, we’re seeing this experimentation at organizations, in terms of using it for tasks like summarization, first draft policy development, code development, and things like that. But at the same time, depending on the materiality of the use case, there’s been a lot of thought around how to adjust a governance and risk framework to deal with low-level as well as high-level use cases. So, a lot going on, a lot of risks. Some are existing AI risks that everybody was aware of already, like accountability, explainability, bias, and things like that. However, some of these risks are amplified, or new risks are introduced with generative AI. So, a lot going on there. I’m sure we’re going to talk a lot about data today but at the end of the day, data underpins models. There’s a lot of focus on really looking at data governance and data protection, in the use cases of generative AI models as well. I could talk forever, but I’m sure Phil has some things to say about this.

Phil

Maybe, let’s move to the next slides. I think this is for me, kind of foundational, which is around the data point itself, because I would almost liken it as: you have to be careful that you’re not focused on ‘icing the cake’ before you have a good understanding of the cake. Right. By that, I mean, how good is your data as an organization? Where is it set? Do you have the right to use the data for the purposes that you intend to use it (using new advanced tools)? I think for organizations that are more in the regional banking or kind of mid-size, technology-related companies, this is a big deal because the large financial institutions of the world have had to figure this out for several years now, in order to manage their businesses effectively. But the smaller companies, they can get away with (for some time) saying “Yeah, we have the address of the company in seven places and sometimes it’s different and it’s not always fully written out in some places.” So where would you pull the address from and have this data strategy to understand what data you’ve got, where it sits, how it is governed, how it’s changed over time, (as the information changes), and how robust that is, to be able to use these advanced tools, to enhance the way you run your business. Because there is a great risk that the tools will get ahead of that reality. The tools are giving you answers that are based on flawed data and that is a huge kind of risk when boardroom leaders are, in theory going to make the best use of these tools by making decisions around the information put in front of them. That information needs to be robust. So, I think it’s going to bring an ever-greater focus to the world of data management and data governance. I know many of your firms (those of you who’ve registered), are pretty focused on this and have been building out the talent and the teams that are focused on this. 

Asif

I’ll just bring it a little bit about how we see AI. Because, Donna, to your point, there was a lot of commotion to start off the year, but I think there is a clear line of delineation of what Gen AI is versus what AI is, and other things. What we are very proud and very passionate about is our ability, frankly, to learn from decisions made by different things. We have this proprietary (what we call “expert in the loop”) approach to prescribe classifications, and decisions, that benefit organizations that are sort of comparable, if you will, in terms of size, location, and product offerings. So, what it means is that if you’re an asset manager, (or if you’re looking at mortgage lending, or in a certain state) the information that you’re looking for, you would get what you want. Again, through technology, we can add data. Again, to Phil’s point, about how important data is, we can add different resources in a very rapid turnaround. I think those are some important things: where data is really important, but you need to have a trusted partner in that. You can’t cross the partner, who takes data seriously in those elements and how you talk about curation and refined data, I think about from a compliance perspective of expansive mapping, if you will, how do you automatically map user-defined labels to make citations, to enable extending, taxonomy based on sort of user-defined data? So I think data is a very big word, but how do you bring it home? How, you know, what is? You know, how do you make it useful in that sense?

Donna

How do you connect the data to the risk? Right? Because, when you’re using AI, in any sense, you know, there’s a use case, there’s an outcome you’re looking to achieve? Right? Then the next question is, what data is going to be put into that use case? Are you using personal data? Are you not using personal data? Are you using your own data? But are you using external third-party data, like so kind of like just going through the whole lifecycle and thinking about the different elements and at the end of the day, every use case should be risk-weighted, and understood: “Okay, this is a low-level,” we’re just using it to write a first draft of an RFP. It’s low level, or it’s high level, we’re actually using it for credit adjudication because we’re an insurance company. So really thinking about it in that risk of real risk-based approach to how you are doing your model risk management. I think this is a real area, I was actually talking to one of the Canadian regulators the other day about this because this is really important, because at the end of the day, when you start using generative AI, you’re not necessarily part of a risk team. You might be in a group, in product development, and/or something like that. You still need to understand the risks and I think this is going to be one of the biggest challenges for all banks, (regardless of size) is thinking about how they are going to apply agile risk management processes that are robust, yet also agile.

Asif 

Yeah, 100%. So then going (I think we touched upon some of this) But Donna, you want to touch upon some of the FI’s? Again, a little bit more on third-party risk management?

Donna

Oh, yeah. So you can develop your own model in-house, or you can use a third-party model, or a third-party solution. When you start using third-party solutions, if you are a financial institution, and you are regulated, you are responsible, you take on the risk of your third parties. So this is an area where we’re going to see a lot of focus on but now that the regulate regulations are getting a little bit more clear. We’re going to see a lot more focus on third-party risk management, in terms of how it works practically. Traditionally, in third-party risk management, you have a service provider, you develop a contract, and you have these contract obligations. But in a world where technology and business is moving so fast, you have to have a much more intimate relationship with your third party. If something goes wrong, you’re using bad data from a third party, you are taking on that risk, right? And that could be financial, it could be reputational. By the time you’re looking at the contract, you could have a significant business impact, right? So this whole area of third-party risk management, I think we’re going to see is a very key theme from both FI’s because the financial institutions are taking on the risk. And they’re going to need a lot more assurances around how third parties are using their data, and how they can get that day-to-day. assurances that there isn’t anything amiss,

Asif 

Yeah. Phil, do you want to add anything in there?

Phil

Yeah, look, I think Donna hit the nail on the head. I think this bullet point at the end here is where the relationship has shifted, it’s this notion that it used to be about, do we have a good contract? Do we have the legal team, you know, produced a good contract that covers all of the bases that we’ve got the slavery protections, whatever it might be, from a legal perspective, and it shifted to more about operational considerations. So data sharing, access controls, cyber risks, those types of things where you can, as an institution be dragged into the issues that your suppliers have, or could have, I think is much more about resilience and operational risk. And that has been a significant shift and a huge focus from regulatory bodies, of course, in the last couple of years in particular. Awesome, awesome. 

Asif 

Then, it brings us to 2024. Right. So I guess, before we start 2024, another thing that I will say, again, bringing it a little bit on the Reg change and compliance. Another thing I saw more of than ever before, was that with so much happening in q1, going into q2 of this year, the complexity and the velocity of the requirement for the Compliance Office, just went at a crazy pace. What I keep saying is that, you know, many years back when technology when the 2008 happened when banks and financial institutions were having different kinds of challenges. On mostly the trading side, technology became a must-have not a nice to-have. I’m seeing the same tenacity right now in the compliance officers at the banks and the financial institutions. And what I mean by that is that, with the regulators becoming more proactive than reactive with everything that is happening around the globe, just not in the United States, but I see it in Canada, I see it in Europe, that technology is now became becoming a must-have, in that sense. How do you actually use technology as a co pilot? If you will, right? So, it’s not about eliminating jobs or doing that. But how do how do you really help? And it goes back to the notion that how can you work in a smarter way, by using technology and especially repeatable stuff? How do you actually get those things in a very repeated way, in a very consistent way? However you want to do it? Because you have technology now, and you can use that. With all that said, nice.

Donna

Can I add to that? Because I love that point. I think that there’s a real opportunity for the challenger banks. I call them challenger banks, because in Canada, we’ve got like “Big Five” banks, and then we have these challenges. But I think there’s a real opportunity here for them if they use technology because they’re more nimble. They are not as heavily reliant on legacy systems here in Canada 80% of technology in one of the top five banks is legacy systems. So, you can imagine how that hampers real, real progress when you’re trying to deal with things where you have to deal with data lineage, for example. So I think that’s a great point that you made Asif, that technology is an enabler, we all know that. I think we’re at a really interesting time for firms that really embrace it and make that investment. They have a real opportunity, I think, for kind of more growth than they’ve been accustomed to, because I think the organizations that are not leveraging it,  in a younger demographic, are not going to have the same longevity.

Asif 

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely, I agree. Phil, before we go on to 2024, anything about before, on 2023 what are the other pressing points, and again, wearing your risk hat and others, bringing it to the risk and compliance area? Anything that you see that was very in the forefront?

Phil 

Yeah, well, I certainly, first of all, would emphasize what Donna has said there about FinTechs, they build their companies in a different way. And so, if you’re working in a large organization that has to do a KYC refresh, you’ve got hundreds or thousands of people writing out to come to companies and individuals, refreshing the information. A FinTech would, every three months, as you log into their app ask you to confirm that your information is still the same. And if you don’t, you can’t access the system. So, they haven’t an embedded way of just checking and refreshing their information, and having an audit trail that they have validated the information they hold. Because, you know, a lot of organizations across many different industry segments actually have coped in recent years, largely through people. Largely through systems that do some of what they need to do, but then people are filling the gaps of the technology. I think we’re seeing a shift to risk management being much more about technology actually building earlier in processes, steps that protect the organization and protect their customers and clients in the product flow, in the product management, if you like. And so that is a huge effort for existing businesses to kind of re-engineer their processes and shift the controls left. But it’s one that, in order to be efficient and not to continue to have armies of people doing this stuff. Because in that notion, AI is just going to tell you that you’ve got outcomes that are varied. That you make mistakes, that you don’t catch things, that when you look at it, you’re looking at it downstream in the process, and things can already have come off the tracks. So, I think there’s an increasing focus on the controls in an organization. Where are those controls what type of controls they are, and how can we push those controls to be more preventative and further left and earlier in the process themselves, using technology and the steps in the technology of FI’s business works.

Asif 

Cool. So now let’s talk very quickly about, (I think the way we want to do it.) So, if you guys have questions, guys, please start putting them in the Q&A, we would love to answer some questions also. But before we go to the questions and everything, let’s talk about 2024. Right? I mean, what does 2024 look like, in that sense? Donna, can I start with you? In that sense from Canada? Can you give us give us a perspective? 

Donna

I guess I can try. Because there’s a lot of regulation right now. It’s very heavy here. There’s been some emphasis, post-COVID on operational resilience. We had a new guideline called E-21 that focuses on operational resilience. What that is, (to listeners) it’s alright, how resilient is your organization to disruption? So COVID was a disruption that caused a lot of operational issues. So operational resilience focuses on that. To assess, what are your critical operations, and you can see why that’s important, right? Because digitization is rampant within the banking sector. Those are critical operations. Your retail banking system goes down, which has significant issues for your organization. So the interesting thing about this is they also brought in a novel guidance that links integrity with security. So what they say is, the more integral your organization, and the stronger your culture around risk management governance, the more likely you’re going to have to protect yourselves from security breaches and threats. Then they kind of link that into another new guideline on culture and behavior risks. And this is really getting into improving the strength of your culture, and getting back to what I was saying: everybody’s got to understand risk going forward. If you’re offside on risk, how are you monitoring bad behavior in your organization? So, there’s this whole new emphasis on this, and there is a lot to unpack, and the guidance brings in a lot of horizontal risks and links a lot of different legislation. So, it’s going to keep people very, very busy here. And I stopped there because I could go on and on about regs, I’ll let Phil say, but there’s a lot more happening, in terms of transparency, disclosure and model risk management.

Asif

Phil? 

Phil

Yeah, well what we proved in 2023, is that we all live in a goldfish bowl. The world works extremely fast when you get things wrong. I think the implications of that can be fast and they can be severe (we saw that obviously.) Now there will be there will obviously be a lot of focus continually on any FDIC insurance reform that comes as a result of the apparent shock that there’s a lot of banks out there holding deposits for clients, businesses and personnel that are more than 250,000. I don’t think it should have been a shock. And that reform or not, would it take the shape of the savings market? Because so far, it’s happened to banks who are largely commercially focused. I think if there were any challenges with banks having much more of the US consumer exposure, then this whole awareness of deposits to save up to 250,000 and not beyond that, I think would be a much bigger issue in the general public, and it would change consumer behavior, even more than it might already have been impacted. So I think that’s one thing that we remain watchful about in relation to what could happen, but this reputation management is the way that I think about things overall. So that brings in the conduct of the firm it brings in the strength and stability of your suppliers that we talked about earlier, the data. I remember when we were asked to do PPP loans in the pandemic and we said, as an organization, we will not be able to handle this manually, There’ll be too much fraud, and we’ll never get the loans booked. You know, we will be a logjam. So we have to do it on an automated basis as much as possible. So why don’t we push the information that we have to each client and almost get them to kind of very quickly verify that information? Of course, as soon as we did that, all we did was tell our clients who don’t have up-to-date information about you, right? And so I think this whole notion that data is the key to unlocking this much more digital world that organizations can operate in. We have so many examples of it everywhere we look really. So, I think that’s going to continue to be a huge theme this year (or next year.)

Asif

Yeah and again, another thing I’m seeing, as we are going into 2024, I already talked about how technology would I feel, I truly feel that would play a bigger part. Another thing that I saw was that reg change if you will, was just seen as what are the new regulations that impact us? It kind of stopped at that, from reg change management to now the reg change management is blending with the policy change management, to what I’m calling compliance change management. And what I mean by that is with reg change, how do you use technology to actually take the reg change management and what are your policies and procedures, your controls? How does it affect you? If there’s a new regulation coming in, how do you use technology to actually help in those elements? We visited a lot of our customers, we sat with a lot of customers, and actually announced a solution earlier this year, called “Bring your own content” with that very narrative, which is to say that (and we jokingly), called this summer, the summer of HR, because what is now happening is that the compliance officers and risk officers, they are just not sitting in a silo, they are actually talking to everybody in the group, and what is my HR policy number 2121? How does that affect you, or regulation here or there? Either? It’s an M&A activity, either, you know, whatever it is, how do you, again, use technology to help you get there faster? And that’s one thing that I feel like as we go into 2024, it will happen more, more and more of that.

Phil

And then I think Asif,  I think that’s where Compliance AI, where the AI has really come into its own because if a senior regulator stands up today, at a lunch and does a presentation and mentions three words that you can map back to regulation, in other words, signaling something that could change or is coming or reference to it, that you can, instead of playing whack a mole and catch up/trying to keep up with things that you actually get insights into what regulators are thinking, where the puck is traveling, and to get the business thinking about the business strategy in the light of evolving compliance and regulatory change. 

Asif 

Yeah. And again, before I go from the slide to the next one. Donna, do you see anything? I have two more questions before we go to the next slide from your perspective, Donna do you see the first half of 2024 differently? Do you see something different happening? Before I go to Phil,  I’ll just throw it out here: Next year being the election year, do you see more regulations or less regulation? But before I go there, Donna I’ll go to you first and then to Phil.

Donna

So, I don’t know too much about how the politics swing in the US but you know, interesting, ESG was supposed to come out from the SEC in April of 2023 and we still haven’t seen it, right. So politics do play. I don’t know if I have any comment on whether we’ll see more or less. I know here in Canada, a lot is going on because we’re updating our privacy regulations. We’ve got ADA, which is our AI act. We have existing regulations like consumer protection that are looking at how AI might impact their existing roles, and what might need to be updated. We’ve had we have pretty big issues here in terms of financial crime and money laundering and there’s a lot of attention on that. So, there’s just a huge volume here and a non-election year. So, I’m sorry, I can’t comment really.

Asif  

No worries about that. Phil, do you? Do you have any worries?

Phil

Yeah, just very quickly, I think. For me, there are two aspects to it. One is I think there will be more regulation in areas where it’s considered by regulators that it’s going to be helpful and clarify things and kind of bring into the context that the second thing is, the potential that as the regulators shift down the spectrum of bringing what they’ve always looked at, for larger institutions to medium size institutions is really policing the existing regulations more heavily. And that will feel to regional banks and smaller organizations and other financial institutions like new regulations because they’re going to be expected to up their game. A perfect example being third-party risk management, where smaller banks have a pretty plain vanilla process to that. But obviously, larger banks have very sophisticated considerations around fourth-party risks and other things. And so I think it’s going to feel like there’s more regulation, even if there’s not, because there’ll be more policing of some of the higher risk areas.

Donna

And the regulators are much more data-driven themselves, and how they police. So they’re much more apt how they oversee is much more technical than it used to be. And we know here that some of the regulators are going through modernization efforts, specifically on modernizing their technology.

Asif 

So we have a question for me, it’s very technical. So I can go back to my engineering team. And I can find out, but I’ll throw it to you, Amanda. And fair enough, you may have an answer to this. When discussing data governance with engineers, what technical terms should we use to communicate how to silo personal data? From the training, create privileged access.

Phil

Yeah, I think we, we can take it offline with Amanda, I think ultimately, this is all about the governance around test-to-learn environments, and also how you make sure that as you’re building things, you can you know, have sandbox environments where you can use data, but you’re not doing any damage with them or you’re not using data for any purpose it wasn’t intended to be used for and things like that. So there has to be strong governance around this and the notion of your SDLC practices. And the way that you know, what agile engineering is governed as well, but you’re the technology guy Asif. So,

Asif 

So, yeah, yeah and we can take it offline also. But one follow-up question I had to give a better answer, if you will, is “Do you mean that you have some data that you want to share and other data that you want to keep private?” Meaning, how you want to do that. Pull data may be available to many constituents and some not. So, we can take it offline. We will definitely answer that question for you.

Donna

From a big picture view, not versus technical view. People should know what PII data is across the data science team. So just sharing that information like “what is PII data?”  and what should be what should be protected at a higher access privilege, I think just, you know, linking it to the reg and what is PII data?

Asif

Awesome. So, before I go to the next slide, which is a little poll “Where do you stand in your tech evolution”, which is some of the questions in here that you see. One thing I will say is that, as we have been seeing and I’ve mentioned the complexity and the velocity before, it continues to increase, and what I see more and more often is that it was already the case in 2023. In my opinion, it will be more the case in 2024, that you need to use technology as your co-pilot. It is not about eliminating; it’s not about getting rid of it. Think about it as a co-pilot of how you do that. And it’s the only way to, frankly, remain ahead of the increasingly proactive regulator regulators that are out there. And I don’t know, Phil, I mean, with your experience as the COO and other major roles that you have had, what do you think? Again, looking back and looking ahead, what was technology? Can you talk a little bit about that, if you will?

Phil

Yeah, we mentioned earlier that if you go back a few years, a lot of organizations through people that these challenges, and of course, that was one way of, quickly catching up with where you need to get to we also talked earlier about the strategic challenges organizations will face in traditional banking areas. So, you know, deposit gathering, lending, everyone’s focused on fee income and cards and FX and other revenue streams like that. And if you talk to almost every bank, they want to focus on wealth management, right? So, kind of everyone is in a very similar boat. And the outcome of that is we’re going to have to watch costs very carefully. And therefore, you can’t keep throwing people at problems, we have to automate the way in which we conduct our business more effectively. And those technology investments have got to produce a compelling ROI, relative to ‘people costs’ of handling that work, right? Companies can shift their employees from the United States to a lower-cost location. But actually, the long-term fix is to digitize these processes. I think providers will have those solutions and will get smarter at helping those organizations to get short-term returns on those investments for a long-term contract and fix for these particular areas. I think it’s where the institutions and the technology providers will partner understanding that that is the end game, right is risk management is process improvement. But it’s cost control and cost reduction at the same time. Because strategically, that’s what the organization needs to happen, there’s not going to be a 5% increase in budget, in tech and ops, there is not going to be those kinds of numbers, and you’ve got to pay the staff that you have, who are all coping with inflation and other costs. So, you’ve got to find efficiencies, and that’s really going to be the scale to navigate that as leaders in these areas. 

Asif 

Awesome.

No, I totally agree and that really takes us to an end, guys, if anyone has any questions or anything, please feel free to ask. But I’ll take this opportunity to talk a little bit about why Compliance AI? I mean, as we are talking about technology and everything. Some of the things that I have seen in this industry for some time is the first part, which is the reg intelligence. It’s table stakes, a lot of companies do that which is really providing you feeds, jurisdictions, all that. But it’s the impact analysis. It’s the business profiling of what we do. Our ability to actually automatically map reg requirements based on the lines of business and jurisdictions: it could be federal, could be state, could be international foreign organizations. The capability to enable rapid onboarding and accurate filtering of record changes, I think those are important things. The in-depth, you don’t have to worry about “what are the new regulations that are coming in?” Another thing that I talked about earlier, which we are very proud that we have started doing is really what I call hierarchical user content processing. or bring your own content solution that automatically maps record changes to impact or documents and policies could be controls could be anything, it really reduces the time and resources needed to monitor and maintain accurate and scalable connections between record changes and internal documents and policies. I think those are important things. Automatic obligation extraction, how do you actually very quickly do that? Is also very important. And if you are international, we cover about 30, auto-translated languages, and enforcement action explorer, I know it’s important because we include near real-time enforcement action intelligence that really enables your organizations to make decision decisions based on violations, penalties and respondent information. So, there are a lot of things that are out there. And as, as 2024 is kicking off, I really encourage you to set up a demo with our team, I think Ronjini will share the link and everything. We will be more than happy to. We are trying to do a lot of those things. We can definitely help you get a great start in 2024 when it comes to direct change management or even policy change management when it comes to bringing your own content perspective. Ronjini. Back to you. Any questions, any more questions? I have in the background, the question that was asked around the first thing, so we will get back to the person who asked the question. With more details, we will email and I have some more information from my team, who are more intelligent than I am from an engineering perspective. So, they will I will send more information on that.

Ronjini Joshua 

Thank you guys, this is a great discussion, a lot of things to think about in the coming year. Again, thank you so much for joining us, this will be on demand and will be sent out to everybody. So you will get a chance to kind of go back and listen to the parts that you might have missed. Or if you came in late or early or had the leaves, you’ll be able to catch some of it. If you are interested in a demo, you can feel free to email us at marketing@compliance.ai. We’ll be happy to customize a demo for you and your team. In addition, you’ll be able to actually right on our website, you can actually go to www.compliance-ai.com And right on the right corner, request a demo and we can get that scheduled for you. And then as you actually take a look at the chat box, we have a direct link there too. So you could take a look there. But thank you everyone for joining. Happy Holidays. I hope you have an amazing new year. And you all are prepped with technology solutions to help you do whatever you need to do.

Asif 

I really want to thank Phil and Donna, thanks a lot for your insights and for your greatest insights and all the expertise that you have provided. And Happy Holidays from me to everyone.

Ronjini Joshua

Thank you, everybody. Have a great day. Thanks everyone.