Laura Glynn is the director of global regulatory compliance at Fenergo.

 

How should 2019 be known?

It will be known for digitalizing the entire client journey, from the very first touch point to day to day trades.

Which regulatory changes do you expect to occur this year?

Digitalization, open APIs, utility services, distributed ledger technology, and artificial intelligence are some prominent technologies that will have a significant impact on and potentially disrupt regulation.

Most organizations are trying to deal with existing regulations and trying to keep track of future regulations that could impact their business. Financial institutions will be looking for automated processes for dealing with regulatory changes as well as a strong reference point with a community of peers.

From an anti-money laundering (AML) perspective, AI can intelligently extract risk-relevant facts from a huge volume of data making the process of identifying high-risk clients even easier in the fight against financial crime. It has the ability to track the changes in regulations around the world, identify gaps in customer information stored by financial institutions and provide know-your-customer (KYC) alerts to perform regulatory outreach to customers collecting outstanding information.

Will 2019 will be “The Year of Institutional Crypto?”

This year will be the year regulators globally focus on initial coin offerings (ICOs) and the regulation of crypto-assets. One firm recently took up legal action against the European Commission for failing to adopt or request modifications to a report issued by the European Securities and Markets Authority. ESMA does not agree with the amendments requested by the Commission, including the use of legal entity identifiers (LEIs) and unique transaction identifiers (UTIs) for reporting to trade repositories, so it will be interesting to see how regulators address regulating crypto.