Finding the right regulatory change management solution has become increasingly difficult as vendors compete to position themselves as leaders in automation.
Many claim to offer AI-powered tools, but as one major U.S. bank recently discovered, some of these promises fall apart under scrutiny. After investing in a supposedly “AI-driven” platform, the institution realised that much of the work was being done manually by human teams processing regulatory documents, claims AscentAI.
The experience highlights a growing issue within the RegTech industry—overpromising automation capabilities without truly delivering on them.
The problem stems largely from how most regulatory intelligence providers operate. Many rely on repurposed horizon scanning tools originally built to track and identify new or updated regulatory documents. While these tools can flag when something changes, they stop short of interpreting the obligations embedded within those texts. In other words, they deliver the information but leave customers to handle the most time-consuming part—understanding what the change means and determining its relevance.
True regulatory change management requires much more than collecting documents. AscentAI argues that genuine automation should extract, interpret, and operationalise obligations directly from regulatory text. This approach allows organisations to automatically identify and catalogue obligations as evolving data objects, assess their relevance, and generate detailed comparisons between old and new rules. The system even connects these changes to policies and controls in a governance, risk and compliance (GRC) framework, automatically alerting users when updates impact specific areas.
According to AscentAI, this level of automation eliminates the inefficiency of manually reviewing documents or spreadsheets. It also creates a defensible audit trail by maintaining comprehensive change logs—critical for demonstrating compliance to regulators. However, the company warns that many vendors fail to disclose how their “AI” achieves these results, which can leave clients unknowingly performing manual steps.
BJ Sanford, a U.S.-based bank regulatory lawyer and former IBM data specialist, has recognised AscentAI’s unique approach, stating that it is “the only product in this category that approached managing [regulatory] data the way we [as subject matter experts] thought about it.” Sanford explained that while most firms start with the simpler task of horizon scanning, AscentAI differentiated itself by tackling the complex issue of regulatory obligations directly.
At the heart of AscentAI’s methodology is its obligation-based data strategy, which moves away from document dependency. When onboarding new clients, the platform conducts a detailed review of the organisation’s operations and obligations, building a complete, versioned obligations register. Any new rule or amendment is then automatically assessed against this register, providing real-time applicability insights and eliminating redundant work.
By contrast, competitors using document-based approaches treat each regulatory update as a separate event, forcing compliance teams to re-evaluate from scratch every time. This approach is not only inefficient but also expensive. AscentAI contends that horizon scanning tools simply cannot deliver the deep automation required for effective regulatory change management.
Sanford added that once the obligations problem is solved, “providing a valuable regulatory change management feed and regulatory tracking is much easier, and it becomes much more valuable to the customer.”
For financial institutions evaluating their next RegTech investment, AscentAI advises caution. Before committing to a vendor, organisations should ask whether the solution defines an obligations inventory, extracts obligations automatically, provides redlined comparisons, delivers summaries, issues alerts, and logs all changes for audit purposes. These criteria separate true automation from marketing claims.
Regulatory change management cannot be achieved through partial solutions. Businesses that fall for overhyped offerings risk wasting time and resources while remaining vulnerable to compliance failures. AscentAI urges firms to seek platforms that automate the entire regulatory lifecycle—from monitoring and capturing updates to mapping obligations and integrating seamlessly with GRC systems.
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