The development of regtech solutions will enable advisers and accountants to decide what is best for clients in a more seamless way, along with the additional benefit of managing business risks.
“Regulatory technology or regtech, in essence, is the change of an industry that is being rapidly impacted by technology and whilst we’ll see the role of regtech in financial services in some years, it is happening against the backdrop of the current pace of change,” The SMSF Academy managing director Aaron Dunn told the recent BGL Regtech17 conference in Sydney.
“Things like agility, speed, integration and analytics are all part of the impact that regtech will have today and into the future.
“Ultimately, this will enable us to make better decisions that we can act on with our clients and it helps us to better manage risk inside our practices as well, which hopefully provides an overall better financial result for you.”
Dunn said a key characteristic of regtech is that it is cloud-based.
“The enablement of cloud technology is truly redefining the client/adviser relationship and the success of many of you today in practice,” he said.
“Of course, it’s not going to be the panacea for all compliance challenges, but in the short term we are going to see regtech help firms automate many of the more mundane compliance tasks and also reduce some of the operational risks when it comes to meeting compliance and reporting obligations.”
He said the spread of technological change to regulation had resulted in financial services businesses focusing on providing technology and technology-based solutions to manage, improve and, importantly, future-proof business operations.
“For many of you, the past 18 months has been a whirlwind, but with the introduction of some of the most significant [superannuation] reforms in the past decade, we have seen business try to address these regtech issues for you,” he said.
“I guess some specifics here when we think about this is not only do they allow you and give you the capability to understand the reforms, but to actually help better interpret what they mean for your clients.
“So, for example, to be able to go and simply find the type of clients that are impacted by the $1.6 million balance transfer cap change is one good example of how we’ve been able to use regtech to advance and improve the way in which you could communicate with your clients.
“And this is certainly going to be the case more and more as we go into the future with the likelihood of both government and client demands continuing to increase.”
