Catalysing Efficient Change Through RegTech with Niresh Rajah & Alan Blanchard

Catalysing Efficient Change Through RegTech with Niresh Rajah & Alan Blanchard #12

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Hosted By Jawad Akhtar

Guests

Niresh Rajah, Managing Director, Head of Data, RegTech & Digital Advisory Practice

Alan Blanchard, Global Head of Partnerships, VERMEG

Episode show notes

Recent research from Grant Thornton, 50-70% of a firm’s annual change budget is spent on regulatory change – could the growth of comprehensive RegTech solutions impact that for the better?

 

Peering into the future of how RegTech can be used more efficiently, we hear from Grant Thornton UK LLP’s Niresh Rajah, and welcome back a former guest on the show, Alan Blanchard.

 

This episode of The VERMEG podcast covers:

  • How to reframe RegTech as an area of value creation rather than simply cost
  • Using technology to ensure consistent compliance and assist horizon scanning
  • Reducing manual work to introduce meaningful cost savings
  • How the Bank of England Transforming data collection changes the landscape for firms

Episode highlights

“When we talk about regulatory cost, how much of that cost comes through from actually having to redo regulatory change, and undertake further expensive activity because you’ve not got it right first time? Technology really helps you, if done properly, achieve sustainable, auditable compliance on an ongoing basis.” – 6:55 – Niresh Rajah

 

“If you keep things the same and maintain the status quo, all that money that you’re spending on these manual processes, it’s dead money. You don’t achieve anything from spending it other than ticking a box when it comes to talking to a regulator. If you pull in these reg tech solutions, you are now able to leverage that technology in other ways.” – 9:10 – Alan Blanchard

 

“There’s still this other piece of education, particularly around RegTech, to understand these issues, understand that they are a problem, they are dragging you down, they are costing you a lot of money, despite all these regulatory projects that come through, spending millions of pounds for solving them, still doing it the same old way. We still haven’t quite mastered that issue awareness.” – 17:10 – Alan Blanchard

 

“There’s always going to be new sets of regulations coming down the pipe as well, which all need to be managed and implemented properly. So I think the direction of travel is good and the technology is ready to go. We can jump on this and start doing some really nice things with this stuff once we’ve really got that tipping point of content in the place where we want it to be.” – 25:10 – Alan Blanchard

 

“Banks have had to get better at having data governance and data controls in place. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their quality of data has been good, especially for the larger organisations with 20 million customers and historical legacy infrastructure, but they’ve had to have this on the road. ” – 27:45 – Niresh Rajah 

 

“By having better data quality, data controls, data governance and therefore better data end to end, You get to a point where you reduce the cost across the ecosystem from regulators, regulated institutions, ancillary players, technology firms as a whole, you’re actually improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the regulatory ecosystem which has to be good for the whole ecosystem.” – 29:30 – Niresh Rajah 

“It’s becoming a much more data driven environment in which it’s a highly regulated industry. But we can make it as efficient to participate in that industry as possible so that we can allow new market participants, and we can allow innovation within the industry as well. So everyone isn’t tied by these rules and regulations that aren’t aren’t doing the job that they’re supposed to be doing.” – 31:45 – Alan Blanchard

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