CBA uses AI to make sense of regulations

The Commonwealth Bank has piloted artificial intelligence software to convert 1.5 million paragraphs of regulation into actionable tasks.

CBA said in a statement that its London innovation lab, together with ING UK, a law firm, and regtech provider Ascent Technologies ran the pilot on Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) regulatory documents.

MiFID is a collection of laws that apply to financial institutions that operate and provide services across Europe.

CBA said in the pilot project, the participants “used NLP [natural language processing[ and AI to interpret and convert 1.5 million paragraphs of regulation into a series of bitesize, actionable tasks appropriate for the banks".

“Using Ascent’s technology, the banks were able to quickly identify items in the regulation that could be reviewed and actioned, saving hundreds of hours of manual processing,” the partners said in a statement.

British regulator the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) was listed as an “observer” of the project. The FCA is the conduct regulator for 56,000 financial services firms and financial markets in the UK.

It said its observations afforded it a “greater understanding of the potential applications of regtech, NLP and AI and how these technologies can help organisations simplify and meet their compliance obligations”.