Abu Dhabi Global Market’s FSRA launches AI initiative on open regulation

The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) has launched an initiative to encourage the development of intelligent regulatory technology (RegTech) tools and help artificial intelligence (AI) achieve regulatory context and understanding.

Hosted in the ADGM GitHub repository, the Open Regulation (OpenReg) initiative provides a training ground where industry specialists, RegTech companies and the data science community have access to FSRA’s AI models, data, and research to create AI-enabled RegTech tools.

Financial services firms are increasingly relying on AI applications and machine-learning techniques in their day-to-day processes and decision-making. One area that can be difficult to automate is regulatory compliance, as it can be highly cognitive and contextual. Any incomplete information or misinterpretation of a rule could lead to inappropriate business decisions, improper risk management and control, or possible regulatory breaches.

Understandably, firms are reluctant to deploy AI in regulatory compliance and instead rely on in-house or outsourced specialists for compliance assurance through manual processes. This creates inefficiencies and increases the cost of being regulated.

Without regulatory context, AI applications will be limited in their potential to help financial services firms navigate the regulatory landscape. In this regard, OpenReg provides the regulatory context required by firms to develop their own AI solutions.

The OpenReg initiative builds on the foundation of FSRA’s earlier project on ‘Digital Regulation’, by providing interested stakeholders an opportunity to engage with us on the further evolution of this important RegTech innovation.

The FSRA and the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) are also working on a collaboration to leverage OpenReg and the university’s deep AI expertise to accelerate the adoption of AI in financial regulation. One specific area of interest relates to the development of programmable compliance in smart contracts to harness the potential of decentralised finance.

Emmanuel Givanakis, CEO of the ADGM FSRA said: “This is the first time a regulator has tried to provide the regulatory context in the form of machine-readable regulations and AI models. By working with the industry and developer community and providing access to the underlying data that we used to create our own AI model, we are looking toward building smarter AI and RegTech solutions, that make financial regulation simpler, clearer, and more effective.”