For years, Google Cloud has been driving business transformation across the financial services industry with native and partner solutions. These solutions help customers drive top line growth, improve efficiency, and better manage risk. Among these are a growing number of tools for improving how financial services organizations solve for increasingly complex regulatory requirements. Collectively known as RegTech, these solutions not only make it easier to manage regulatory requirements, but they also represent an opportunity for organizations to become more agile and efficient in an increasingly digitized marketplace. RegTech can also simplify the work of the regulators themselves and provide better industry-wide insights.
The driver behind RegTech is the same as it is for FinTech: digital transformation. Banks, insurance companies, and other financial services organizations are now leveraging Google Cloud across the board for a number of strategic use cases, including anti-financial crime and risk modeling.
Google Cloud’s role is to support customers where they are in their modernization journeys with our own technology fortified by a robust ecosystem of partners. As a platform provider, Google Cloud supports these efforts in three ways:
Offering ways for vendors to modernize their legacy reporting applications
Supporting organizations in building net-new cloud-native solutions
Providing our own technology with which financial services organizations can streamline and automate the regulatory reporting process
Robust infrastructure and security for modernizing legacy reporting applications
Google Cloud’s robust, highly scalable global infrastructure provides a secure-by-design foundation with a shared-fate model for risk management supported by products, services, frameworks, best practices, controls, and capabilities to help meet digital sovereignty requirements. This infrastructure creates an opportunity for established software providers with a wide on-premises user base to modernize their tech stacks so they can leverage cloud capabilities either as a managed service or a SaaS solution.
For example, Regnology, a provider of regulatory reporting solutions, has partnered with Google Cloud to bolster its regulatory reporting offering with a fully-fledged cloud service known as Rcloud. The platform uses Google Cloud infrastructure to enhance Regnology’s regulatory reporting offering across its complete set of cloud-native solutions and managed services, with vertical and horizontal scaling for better performance and greater efficiency. Underpinned by Google Cloud, Rcloud benefits from improved deployment and infrastructure-as-code services, run and change management automation, high scalability, and future-proofed architecture for additional services and products. Furthermore, Regnology Rcloud’s integration with BigQuery allows organizations to build a granular and cohesive finance and risk warehouse, which can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of the end to end data supply chain.
“We are excited to be partnering with Google Cloud to develop an enhanced platform for our customers, presenting a seamless delivery of service as part of a one-stop shop offering,” says Rob Mackay, Chief Executive Officer at Regnology. “Our mission is to connect regulators and the industry to drive financial stability, and as such it is important to us to build the future of regulatory reporting on energy efficient and scalable architecture.”
Powering cloud-native RegTech solutions with data and AI
Google Cloud’s advanced data and AI capabilities, such as BigQuery, Vertex AI, and Apigee API management, have attracted newer RegTech players as well. Google Cloud partner Quantexa, for example, offers a Decision Intelligence platform powered by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and tools such as Dataproc. The solution gives customers the ability to understand their data by connecting siloed systems and visualizing complex networks. The result is a single view of data that becomes their most trusted and reusable resource across the organization. Quantexa provides an intelligent “model-based” system that probes networks and behavior patterns to uncover financial crime, allowing customers to better comply with anti-money laundering (AML) regulations. Quantexa helps customers establish a culture of confident decision making at strategic, operational, and tactical levels to mitigate risk and seize opportunities.
Google Cloud is key to Quantexa’s ability to generate real-time, AI-driven financial crime alerts, according to Quantexa CTO Jamie Hutton. In particular, GKE provides Quantexa the scaling power to effectively deploy Elasticsearch, an enterprise search engine for data querying that’s central to Quantexa’s entity resolution and network analytics. “We deploy Elasticsearch in Google Kubernetes Engine, which gives us the ability to scale as required on a granular process level,” says Hutton. “And because Google is the architect of Kubernetes, we know that we always have the latest updates and features available with Google Kubernetes Engine, ahead of any other provider.”
Google Cloud tools to facilitate regulatory reporting
Google Cloud powers out-of-the-box solutions, such as Google Cloud Regulatory Reporting Platform, a scalable, on-demand serverless solution with data controls built into the architecture at each step to maximize performance and reliability while minimizing operational effort. You can store and query large, granular datasets in BigQuery as a consistent (and cost-effective) source of high-quality data to power multiple report types (e.g. across risk, financial and regulatory reporting).
Google Kx for CAT is an enterprise-grade application designed to accommodate the sophisticated and complex reporting transformations required by The Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT). CAT is a regulatory reporting obligation for U.S. broker-dealer firms and demands the kind of intensive compute power and storage requirements historically associated with bespoke implementations.
Google Cloud Analytics Hub is a data exchange that allows you to efficiently and securely exchange data assets across organizations to address challenges of data reliability and cost. Analytics Hub enables data providers like Dun & Bradstreet to publish their data sets for analysis in BigQuery. Regulators, for example, can access this information to see how individual banks and financial services institutions are being compliant.
Where will the RegTech journey take us?
RegTech is a rapidly growing and maturing area with tremendous potential not only to make it easier for financial services organizations to meet their regulatory obligations, but also to deliver real business value. Google Cloud’s goal is to enable customers to maximize that value, whether the solutions are native to Google Cloud or offered by one of our many partners. As the field progresses, it’s likely to bring new capabilities and insights that go beyond compliance to manage risk, support growth and improve customer experience.
Learn more about how Google Cloud’s RegTech capabilities are making it easier for organizations to meet their regulatory responsibilities and more.
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